Saudi stock market is approaching its actual upgrade to emerging market according to many global indices, meanwhile, S&P Dow Jones announced it will upgrade Saudi Arabia's bourse to emerging market status from a stand-alone market next year, becoming the latest in a series of index firms to promote Riyadh.
S&P indicated it will add major Saudi stocks to its global indexes in two stages: a 50 percent weighting in March 2019 and raise their weightings to 100 percent in September.
The company had been considering a Saudi upgrade for several years, and issued a statement Tuesday saying that it was acting in response to reforms of Riyadh's market structure supporting foreign investment as well as a strong, positive consensus among members of the investment community.
It is worth mentioning that FTSE Russell decided in March this year to upgrade the Kingdom to an emerging market starting March 2019, and MSCI made a similar decision in June during its annual review.
Earlier, S&P Dow Jones estimated Saudi Arabia's market weight to rise by 2.57 percent in case of full listing, and if 50 percent was included, it would be 1.3 percent.
In light of this information, many financial reports issued over the past few months have suggested that the Saudi stock market should be upgraded to emerging global markets. This comes against the backdrop of the huge economic reforms undertaken by Saudi Arabia over the last few years, which have boosted the efficiency of local financial market and made it an attractive destination for leading global financial indices.
Earlier in March, FTSE Russell announced that market authorities in Saudi Arabia have taken the required steps to implement market reforms and now meet the formal requirements to be included in FTSE GEIS.
“Saudi Arabia will be the largest Middle East market in the FTSE Emerging Index with an overall weighting of 2.7 percent. Within the FTSE Global All Cap Index, Saudi Arabia is projected to have an index weight of 0.25 percent,” explained the statement.
Due to this large projected size within the FTSE Emerging Index, the company proposed to implement the inclusion of Saudi Arabia in several tranches to assist index trackers in their ability to “efficiently replicate the underlying benchmark change.”
The FTSE decision would likely add almost $5.5 billion of cash from index-linked funds to the Saudi market.
Saudi Arabia has taken a number of important steps towards developing the financial market and increasing its chances of being included in the global market indices. Earlier, it decided to ease foreign investment restrictions and apply international accounting standards to companies' lists.
Saudi Arabia has also taken other important decisions to raise its financial market to the global levels by launching the parallel stock market (Nomw), which relates to small and medium-sized companies.
In addition, Capital Market Authority of Saudi Arabia (CMA) is working closely with individual investors and investment funds in the local market. CMA is offering a new draft of resolutions and regulations it intends to implement with investors for voting and expressing opinions.
These developments come at a time when Financial Sector Development Program (FSDP), announced by Saudi Arabia as part of Vision 2030, has become an important step towards the development of the local capital market. In addition, the Kingdom is working dynamically on many economic reforms that contributed to spare the economy negative effects that would have resulted due to declines in oil prices.
The Program is working to enhance the size and development of Saudi capital markets, improve the experience of operators and users, and promote the position of Saudi capital markets at the regional level making it one of the top 10 international markets.
