LISTING

12 May 2016 By PDSNET

A company which has obtained the right to have its shares traded on an organised exchange. The JSE has stringent requirements for companies seeking to have their shares and other instruments listed. Securities may be listed in the industrial, mining or financial sectors, etc. or on the ALT-X. In the industrial section, the company must have: a subscribed capital of at least R25 million in the form of at least 25 million shares, a satisfactory profit history over the last 3 years, audited profit of R8 million before taxation or more, at least 500 equity shareholders (if issuing preference shares, 50 shareholders and if issuing debentures, 25 debenture holders) and 20% of the shares must be held by the public. Obtaining a listing on the JSE enables a company to raise additional capital by selling shares to the public. It also enables the owners of the company to "cash in some of their chips" if they want to. For example, the Saltzman family, which built Dischem up over many years and then listed the company on the JSE, were finally able to sell a large chunk of their shares for approximately R1 billion - and still retain control of the business. Usually, when a company lists, it will make an "initial public offer" of shares to raise capital and issue a prospectus for that. If it simply wants to list without raising capital then it will produce a "pre-listing statement". The purpose of the prospectus and the pre-listing statement is to supply the investing public with important information about the company so that they can make an informed decision when considering whether to buy the company's shares. The listing requirements of the JSE can be found at: https://www.jse.co.za/content/JSERulesPoliciesandRegulationItems/EquitiesRules.pdf You should note that there are now four new stock exchanges operating in South Africa - but they were all registered in 2018 and are much smaller than the JSE. The A2X is the largest. In recent years the numbers of companies on the JSE has been declining steadily. There are now less than 300 listed companies where there used to be more than 700.



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