Samuel Siringi
16 September 2008
New York — Mobile phone service provider Safaricom's initial public offering has scooped a continental award.
The offer which was conducted early this year was declared the "Best African IPO" by a panel of respected judges contracted by the African Investor Index (Ai) Awards organisers.
Equity Bank also won a first prize as the Best Performing Ai 100 company during the awards announced at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday night.
Other local companies that won awards at the event included the Nairobi Stock Exchange, which emerged third among the most innovative stock exchange institutions.
East African Breweries was second in the category of best Performing Ai 40 company, completing the list of four prize winners that made Kenya the country winning most awards at the event.
Nation Media Group was a finalist in the category of "Best Performing Ai 100 Company".
Organised by the African Investor, the awards recognise stock markets, regulators, listed companies, fund managers, stockbrokers and analysts of African equities.
The Africa Investor provides companies indices with independent benchmarks they need to "feel more confident about their investment and strategic decisions".
It produces weekly, value-traded adjusted and market capitalisation-weighted indices.
The Ai 100 and Ai 40 Investors indexes capture the top 40 and 100 of the largest and most liquid publicly traded stocks across Africa ranking them by market capitalisation and by liquidity as measured by the average daily value traded in US dollars.
While receiving the award, Safaricom's chief investor relations officer Les Baillie said the award was a recognition that the company was on the right track after holding the IPO that added 840,000 new shareholders to the Kenyan stock market.
He said the public offering helped show that Kenya was still a good investing ground, even after it was hit by the post-election violence that followed last year's General Election.
"Our shares are also trading well at the Nairobi Stock Exchange, and are consonant with the global trends."
Equity bank director of corporate strategy Mary Wamae said the award was proof that its efforts to serve customers at the "lower end" of the market were bearing fruit.
"This award belongs to the Kenyans who now, through us, understand that owning a bank account is a right rather than a privilege as it used to be before," said Ms Wamae, also a company secretary.
"To be able to serve customers at the lower end of the market shows that our business model that is supported by heavy investment in information technology is working."
Currently, the bank has 2.7 million cash saving clients.
There are 500,000 others who are borrowers of the bank, she said.
"We are investing a lot in mobile and short message text banking, hoping we will reap the fruits by improving our customer base and service efficiency," she said.
She said the bank was also seeking to reach every party of the country, including Northern Kenya where banking services have previously been elusive.
The bank also plans to expand to Sudan and Rwanda.
In the award given to Equity bank, judges were assessing performance of institutions, their commitment to increasing volumes of shares traded, share performance compared with market performance, portion of shares traded on market and major achievements in 2007.
On its part, Safaricom was given the Best African IPO award after judges were impressed by the total size and percentage of stock floated, access to retail investors and percentage of stock floated.
The judging panel included people from the capital markets community in and outside of Africa and representatives from the African Development Bank, Actis and Wits Business School.
"I have been impressed with the efforts of all finalists in raising the standards of the industry and their commitment to corporate governance and investor protection," said chairman of the judging panel, Prof Wiseman Nkhulu.
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