KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 19): Bursa Malaysia said the 60 listed companies participating in the Bursa Research Incentive Scheme (Bursa RISE) have seen their share price increase by 4% since the scheme was launched in late March.
The companies have shown an improved performance, despite the overall negative market sentiment, due to their participation in the scheme, said Bursa chief executive officer Datuk Muhammad Umar Swift.
“For a limited 60 companies that are selected and supported, we already saw an improvement in prices when the general market was negative,” Umar told the media at the launch of Guidebook 3 of the Public Listed Companies Transformation (PLCT) Programme.
Bursa RISE, which complements and supports the PLCT programme running until 2025, aims to improve the trading velocity and corporate profile of participating companies through research coverage and marketing activities.
The participating companies were selected based on a set of quantitative and qualitative criteria.
“We looked at what we thought were strong companies. We looked for better investor relations, so they could better position themselves,” Umar said.
Bursa’s head of investor development Stephanie Tan said Bursa RISE injected about RM25,000 per listed company per annum.
“The scheme is actually for under-researched companies, meaning those having two or less research analysts’ coverage. These are basically fundamentally good companies, but they are, right now, not really profiled in the market.
“That is the reason we try to facilitate the scheme. We give an incentive to research houses to write research reports on these companies. And for companies that require more investor relations assistance, we complement and provide investor relations training,” she said.
Tan added that upon the completion of the programme, Bursa hopes these companies will still be covered by the research houses.
She said Bursa also hopes that the companies will continue to develop their investor relations journey once they have strengthened their investor relations capability and grown an effective stakeholder management.
According to the stock exchange operator, there were 87 listed companies, including half of the FBM KLCI constituents, in the PLCT programme as of Aug 16.
Bursa expects to see at least 300 listed companies participating in the PLCT programme by 2025. As of June 30, there were 959 companies listed on Bursa.