(Vienna) The stock exchanges of Vienna and Belgrade will join forces and work closer together in different areas starting immediately. The General Manager of the Belgrade Stock Exchange (BELEX), Gordana Dostanic, and Michael Buhl, Member of the Management Board of Wiener Börse AG, signed a Memorandum of Understanding today in Vienna. In the future, the two exchanges plan to cooperate mainly in the area of derivatives trading; specifically, Wiener Börse will help the Belgrade Stock Exchange to set up a derivatives market by providing consulting, and assist with the introduction of structured products on the Belgrade Stock Exchange. Furthermore, the two exchanges plan to cooperate in the area of joint data dissemination and vending, and indices.
"The cooperation agreement confirms once again how high demand is internationally for our know-how. Moreover, it demonstrates that our interest is primarily in cooperating with the exchanges of Central and Southeastern Europe. "The cooperation agreement with the Belgrade Stock Exchange brings us one step closer to the common goal of building a strong Central European capital market", stressed Michael Buhl.
The MoU with the Belgrade Stock Exchange is the fifth cooperation agreement of Wiener Börse. In 2004, Wiener Börse signed cooperation agreements with the exchanges of Shanghai, Dubai and Bucharest. Last year, Wiener Börse agreed to cooperate with the Zagreb Stock Exchange. The cooperation agreements with the exchanges in Bucharest and Shanghai took on concrete forms in 2005 in the development of the joint indices ROTX (Bucharest) and CNX (Shanghai), with a joint index being planned with the Zagreb Stock Exchange for this year.
The Belgrade Stock Exchange is one of the smaller, but fast-growing exchanges in Southeast Europe: Market capitalization was EUR 6.7bn at the end of 2005, which corresponds to an increase vs. 2004 of 55.57 percent. The entire BELEX annual trading volume in 2005 was around EUR 470mn. By way of comparison: The market capitalization of Wiener Börse was EUR 107bn at the end of 2005, and the average monthly trading volume on Wiener Börse was EUR 6.1bn last year.