During the past year alone, 44 joint-stock companies were delisted from the Belgrade Stock Exchange, while in 2022, an additional 48 departed from the domestic capital market.
The main reason companies are leaving the Belgrade Stock Exchange is their perception that this capital market represents an obligation and expense, and, in general, they see no benefits from this kind of openness, assessed Nenad Gujaničić, the chief broker at Momentum Securities, in an interview with Biznis.rs.
Currently, there are 891 joint-stock companies listed on the Belgrade Stock Exchange, and according to Gujaničić, trading is consistently conducted with only about ten of these stocks.
On the Prime Listing, the shares of five companies are listed – Aerodrom “Nikola Tesla,” NIS, “Jedinstvo” from Sevojno, Fintel, and Metalac from Gornji Milanovac. On the Open Market, the shares of Dunav Osiguranje, Žitopek from Niš, Impol Sevala, and Messer Tehnogas are traded.
“Some majority owners of capital have taken advantage of the fact that the stock market has been decimated, so they have repurchased the remaining portion of ownership at much lower prices than the real ones, using the current legal regulations. Generally, in a situation where the market is quite weak, the dominance of majority owners over minority shareholders becomes even more pronounced, so we rarely had cases where small shareholders were ‘pushed out’ of the company at fair value,” assessed Gujaničić.
During the year 2007, precisely following the outbreak of the global economic crisis, approximately 220 companies “delisted” from the Belgrade Stock Exchange. The following year, in 2008, another 215 companies made decisions to withdraw, and in 2009, around 225 joint-stock companies followed suit.
In the pandemic-ridden year of 2020, 65 companies departed from the Belgrade Stock Exchange.
From 2004 to the present day, hundreds of companies have followed the same path, and during the year 2023, some very interesting “delistings” occurred. One of them is the exclusion of the shares of Luka Beograd, a company that came into the public spotlight due to issues related to the treatment of minority shareholders and the valuation of capital during privatization. The shares of Luka Beograd were delisted at the request of the current majority owner – Metico Investment.
At the beginning of the previous year, the shares of ALTA Bank were also delisted from the stock exchange, following the completion of a forced share buyback procedure in which all shares were repurchased from a single shareholder. According to the data from the Business Registers Agency, the sole owner of ALTA Bank today is ALTA Pay Group from Belgrade.
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