Bursa to push firms to sell more shares

BURSA Malaysia Bhd, operator of the nation’s exchange, said it will press publicly traded companies to sell more shares to stay in a revamped benchmark stock index, a move aimed at making the equities easier to buy and sell.

“One of the biggest complaints by investors is you have very good companies, but they find it difficult to buy the shares,” Datuk Yusli Yusoff, Bursa’s chief executive officer, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

It will “bring a sense of competition; a lot of companies would want to be in that benchmark,” he said.The bourse is replacing the Kuala Lumpur Composite Index of 102 companies with the new 30-share FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLC on July 6.

Companies in the new index will be required to have at least 15 per cent of their shares publicly available for trading, a level that will increase every six months.The government said yesterday it plans to sell more of its holdings in some of the nation’s biggest companies to help lure more foreign investment to Malaysia after the benchmark index’s 23 per cent climb this year lagged behind returns of other Southeast Asian stock markets.

At least five of the nation’s 10 biggest publicly traded companies by sales, including Tenega Nasional Bhd and Petronas Dagangan Bhd, are partly owned by the government’s investment company, data compiled by Bloomberg show. -- Bloomberg