Stock Exchange Delists First Aluminium Shares
The Nigerian Stock Exchange has delisted the shares of First Aluminium Nigeria Plc from the Daily Official List.
The NSE said in a circular on Wednesday that the delisting was in pursuant to the company’s request for a voluntary delisting.
It said further to the market bulletin of May 13, 2019, which notified dealing members of the suspension of trading in the shares of First Aluminium in preparation for the voluntary delisting of the issued share capital of the company from the daily official list of the Exchange, the shares were delisted on July 31, 2019.
The circular read in part, “Please be informed that the entire issued share capital of First Aluminium Nigeria Plc was delisted from the Daily Official List of the Exchange today, Wednesday, July 31, 2019.”
First Aluminium decried the current illiquidity nature of the capital market, saying it rendered the primary corporate objective of its listing to raise capital and provide liquidity unattainable.
The company, in an explanatory note to shareholders, said it was seeking a voluntary delisting from the main board of the Nigerian Stock Exchange as there had been little or no trading activity on the shares held by the minority shareholders over the last seven years.
It said neither it nor any shareholder was benefiting from the continued listing on the NSE, hence the decision to delist.
First Aluminium said it may consider re-listing in the future if the market conditions were favourable.
In a related development, the NSE announced the launch of its Investor Relations Data Pack, which it described as an innovative and dynamic webpage integrated with key market data, corporate news and disclosures, for corporate issuers.
The NSE said the Investor Relations Data Pack was designed to reduce burden on issuers by providing them with an intuitive investor relations webpage, which could easily be integrated to their existing corporate websites.
It said it featured enhanced interactive functionalities with 99.5 per cent uptime.
The Head, Trading Business, NSE, Mr Jude Chiemeka, described the data pack as a necessary tool required by issuers to improve their engagement with investors.
He said, “We came up with the program to provide value-added service to our issuers and make their daily market statistics available to investors in real-time.”
