Borse Dubai will invest $1.2bn in Taiwan

 

Earlier this month, Taiwan Stock Exchange, or TSE, held talks on selling shares to Borse Dubai, which has been expanding with purchases of Nasdaq OMX Group and the London Stock Exchange.

Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation plans an initial public offering in early 2009, its Chairman Wu Rong-I had said recently in an interview, adding that Borse Dubai was one of the foreign bourses TSE was talking to.

“I met the Borse Dubai chairman. We want to sign a memorandum of understanding first, and we both want to go further,” Wu had said, adding that this was just the first step. “We need to ask more and see what our mutual interests are. We need to find out whether we can work together.”

Borse Dubai Chairman Essa Kazim, who is scheduled to visit Taiwan in May, aims to invest in Taiwan’s exchange-traded funds with high yields, according to the Chinese-language daily. “We do not deny we were in general dialogue,” Kazim was quoted by Bloomberg recently as saying.

The Chinese daily, meanwhile, also said Abu Dhabi’s Brokerage House Securities is scheduled to visit Taiwan at the end of this month to look for local partners, without citing sources.

The Taiwan Stock Exchange plans to sell as much as 25 per cent of itself to foreign bourses, and has held talks with the New York Stock Exchange, Deutsche Boerse, the CME Group and Nasdaq OMX, besides Borse Dubai, it said in December. The exchange said the listing will have to wait until a planned consolidation of the stock exchange, Taiwan Futures Exchange, GreTai Securities Market and Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corporation is completed.

Kazim had said in August that Borse Dubai has a general interest in expanding and is eyeing other stock exchanges. The Dubai exchange may bid for a stake in the Karachi Stock Exchange should the Pakistani bourse be put up for sale. Borse Dubai owns 80 per cent of the Dubai Financial Market.

It also owns the Dubai International Financial Exchange, the Gulf’s first bourse open to issuers and investors of any nationality.

Borse Dubai announced in the beginning of this month a 30.3 per cent stake in Nasdaq OMX Group in a regulatory filing after a complex takeover deal for the Nasdaq Stock Market to buy OMX, a family of Nordic exchanges.

As part of the deal, Borse Dubai sold its 97.2 per cent stake in OMX to Nasdaq Stock Markets in exchange for 2.9 million newly issued Nasdaq shares and around $1.9bn in cash.