The Minister of Economy and Finance, Ernesto Max Tonela, opened this Thursday, October 27, in Maputo, the International Conference on Capital Market and Stock Exchange. On the occasion, he stated the Government’s intention that the Mozambique Stock Exchange “becomes a platform to promote the financing of SMEs”.
“Our perspective is to continue working to strengthen the capital market and turn the Stock Exchange into an important platform to promote financing and support the creation of more companies, which will generate, consequently, more employment, more income and increased alternatives for tax collection,” said the Minister of Economy and Finance.
Max Tonela also referred that “financing is one of the main constraints for the Mozambican economy, especially for small and medium enterprises. It is in this context that the economic acceleration measures recently announced by the Government are framed, some of them specifically to promote forms of financing for SMEs, with emphasis on the creation of the Mutual Guarantee Fund that will be available until next year. It should be remembered that we also have the revision of the foreign exchange law by the Parliament.”
In turn, the president of the Confederation of Economic Associations (CTA), Agostinho Vuma, spoke of the difficulties that companies currently face in order to have access to credit, considering that “in Mozambique, those face great difficulties to finance themselves and access the capital market due to the traditional conditions (commercial banking) tend to become increasingly demanding in terms of cost, because the prime rate of the Mozambican financial system is currently at 20.6% with prospects of increasing by 200 basis points in the coming months.”
In this sense, the president of CTA recalled the need “for the existence of financing alternatives for the private sector, looking at the role of the capital market, which seems instrumental in this process.
Despite the challenges, Agostinho Vuma noted that “the current context has been characterized by a trend towards business recovery. The Business Robustness Index produced by CTA attests to this trend having registered an increase of one percentage point in the second quarter of 2022 compared to the first.”
BVM Launches Work To Ensure Its Memory
The Mozambique Stock Exchange launched in this session a book entitled “Building the sustainable capital market” that portrays the history of the organization, which this year celebrates 24 years of existence. Its president, Salim Cripton Valá, highlighted two objectives of the document: “to ensure the memory of the Exchange and to guarantee that this is a true instrument of financial education”.
