Development slowdown is the only impact of global recession on NASDAQ OMX Armenia

YEREVAN, February 1. /ARKA/. The past year was quite successful for NASDAQ OMX Armenia, despite it was hard for others, Armen Melikyan, director general of this stock exchange, said Friday at a press conference.

“All those markets holding auctions built up their volumes,” he said.

Deals on corporate bonds totaled AMD 10.5 billion in 2009 against the previous year’s AMD 2.2 billion.

Transactions on government bonds grew, compared with the previous year as well, and totaled AMD 2.3 billion.

Besides, a new financial instrument, repo transaction, was introduced in Armenia in December 2008.

The amount of these deals has exceeded AMD 5 billion since then, Melikyan said.

There was fear, he said, that all trading floors would face decline amid the global recession, but nothing like this happened, “since in recent years, Armenia was undergoing development and implementing only those programs focused on development”.

“Our activities started becoming vigorous in 2008, and the global crisis has had an impact on us, but it affected only pace of our development.”

The director general said that although the number and sizes of deals precipitously shrank, capitalization remained almost unchanged, and diminished only by 2% in 2009, compared with the previous year.

“This shows that not only global financial crisis, but also other factors are impacting underdevelopment of this market.”

NASDAQ OMX Armenia (Armenian Stock Exchange OJSC until January 27,2009) was founded in 2001 as a self-regulating organization, a voluntary association of 21 brokerage firms.

Early in November 2007, the stock exchange was transformed to an OJSC. On January 7, 2008, OMX (at present NASDAQ OMX) became sole owner of NASDAQ OMX Armenia and of the Central Depository of Armenia.

Twenty seven companies, including 20 banks, are NASDAQ OMX Armenia Stock Exchange members now. ($1 = AMD 377.45). -0---