NIC to list 192 million shares

By David Mugabe

The National Insurance Corporation (NIC) will list 192 million on the stock market Friday following the completion of the rights issue.

The shares derived from NIC’s right issue offer carried out at the end of 2013 will be one of the bigger corporate actions that took place in 2013 alongside Bank of Baroda’s bonus offer.

During its annual general meeting in 2011, shareholders agreed to have a rights issue as a means of generating additional share capital.

Crested Stocks and Securities are the sponsoring brokers. Joseph Kibuuka of Crested Stocks explained that of the 323 million shares on offer, 274 were paid for.

“The 78 million (balance) will remain paid for but unalloted until Corporate Holdings Ltd. (IGI’s holding company) change their memorandum,” said Kibuuka.

During a rights issue, existing shareholders are offered the chance to buy additional shares of the company. The NIC rights issue was at sh5 per share. On the Uganda Securities Exchange, only two companies traded on a comparatively quiet day.

Stanbic continued its activity on the stock market albeit with a slow movement of shares. In total 153,520 Stanbic shares were sold, resulting into turnover of sh4.6m.

There remained bids for some 28.8 million shares that were not matched with potential offers of over 700,000 shares because of a price mismatch.

Analysts view the high demand for Stanbic shares as the wish by investors to be on the company’s books before the announcement of dividends in a few months.

Listed companies are compelled to publish their final year results by the end of April every year by legal statue. Meanwhile, Umeme had the largest turnover of sh51m after selling 166.600 shares.

Total turnover was sh55.7m, with 320.120 shares traded on Tuesday. There was also demand for some 500,000 Umeme shares and one million UCL shares.