THE top official of the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) said he is bullish on hitting the target of around P200 billion in capital raised by the end of the year.
“We’ll do more capital raising this year, except the peso magnitude in total will not be as big as last year, but we expect to hit about P200 billion in capital raised,” PSE President and Chief Executive Ramon S. Monzon said in a televised interview on ANC’s Market Edge.
In 2021, the PSE raised a total of P234.48 billion, more than double the P103.76 billion total capital raised in 2020.
“We have to understand last year was a record year. We had one big initial public offering (IPO), Monde Nissin Corp. In the present IPO scenario, that would comprise seven to eight IPOs,” he added.
Mr. Monzon said that the exchange has a robust pipeline of IPO applications for the remainder of the year.
“For the first half of the year, we’ve raised about P62 billion of capital so far. We are presently processing another P36 billion in capital raising applications and in the pipeline we’ve commenced talks with three big capital raising activities,” he added.
Mr. Monzon said that the exchange also continues to encourage small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to list on the stock exchange.
“We are not ignoring SMEs. They might add little in terms of contribution of capital raised or listing fees, but encouraging more SMEs to list in the market will be good for the economy,” he said.
“Interest rates are rising and companies are going to need working capital or expansion capital. When interest rates are rising, they will be reluctant to raise capital in the debt market, that would be the bright side of the interest rate spike. Hopefully like last year, they would go to the equity market,” he added. — Luisa Maria Jacinta C. Jocson
