NASD OTC registers N25 billion transactions in 2018

NASD OTC Plc has calculated its total value of transactions in 2018 at about N25 billion, as the promoter of a trading network that eases secondary market trading of all securities of unquoted public companies in Nigeria.

The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, NASD Plc, Bola Ajomale, in his address to market participants at the recent NASD Breakfast Meeting, in Lagos, said trading activities on the platform had increased tremendously during the period.

Ajomale said, in the last three years, the platform recorded huge capital coming into the country in form of long-term investments, rather than trading capital.

According to him, “It is not money that came in and went out because they want to make returns, it was money that came in because they want to assist the company grow, so we have seen a lot of growth, and investment and as time goes on, this kind of investment we will seek to make dividend rather than to sell them when the exchange rate moves”.

Ajomale stated that due to the investment growth witnessed in the past few years, the company decided to launch an enterprise portal- the NASD Enterprise Portal (NASDeP), to boost investment in small enterprises in Nigeria.

“In 2018, we launched three platforms, all of them fully indigenous, built by Nigerian enterprise, because we do have an industry that is growing. In addition, the three portals we have, one is a capital raise platform, which is the enterprise portal, and the second is the trading platform, which allows brokers to trade from any part of the world at any time, using any devise. The third is creating an information portal where people can observe the market within a couple of minutes. Here you will be engaged with the market without logging into the market,” he said.

He noted that the NASD ep portal was designed specifically to address the information gap on start-ups and other growth enterprises and provides a central database of private investment opportunities and investor pools.

“We have seen that going on consistently for about three years and I think that it will continue, again, because of what we have observed, we decided to embrace the idea of setting up a capital raise platform which is the NASD ep so that allows private equities and foreign investors to come into the country looking for opportunities to invest in and hold and help the country grow. So we are actually embracing and encouraging that aspect of market and when these companies grow, we expect they will come to OTC market as a natural migration.” He added.