The CEO of the Mozambique Stock Exchange (BVM), Salim Valá, said that global instability has been affecting the performance of national companies and investors, emphasising that even in the face of adversity, the Mozambican capital market has been “performing positively”. “The consequences of the pandemic, the fluctuations in prices on international markets, the blockage in global distribution chains, the strong inflationary pressures resulting from economic restrictions due to the conflict in Eastern Europe, have brought more risks and uncertainties to an economic climate that was already turbulent,” he said during his presentation at the Economic Briefing, which took place last Thursday, 9 November, in Maputo.
According to BVM’s chairmans, Mozambique “continues to be influenced by trends in the global economy, where the decrease in demand and the consequent fall in the prices of the main commodities exported end up having a negative impact on the level of the country’s exports (aluminium, natural gas, coal, cotton, wood and shrimp), Fears of extreme weather events and the consequences of geostrategic conflicts in sensitive areas of the world, with the risk of rising prices for basic goods such as fuel, transport and food, which are shaking international markets, have affected the economy,” he said.
However, and moving on from the global macroeconomic context to a more local view, Salim Valá notes that, “even in the face of these dilemmas, growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been evolving positively, and the inflation rate has been on a downward trend”, also highlighting “the stability of the metical against the dollar”.
Looking at the state of the Mozambican financial system, he underlined “the resilience of the banking sector, which has shown itself to be solid and well capitalised, with the solvency ratio set at 24% in September 2023, corresponding to 12.0 percentage points above what was recommended,” he concluded.
