Kenya mobile phone service provider Safaricom was on Monday honoured as “Best African IPO” at African Investor Index Awards in New York.
The evening belonged to Kenyan firms who scooped significant awards.
Media reports said the Equity Bank of Kenya won a first prize as the Best Performing Ai 100 company during the awards.
Other Kenyan companies that won awards at the event included the Nairobi Stock Exchange, which emerged third among the most innovative stock exchange institutions.
East African Breweries was second in the category of best Performing Ai 40 company, completing the list of four prize winners that made Kenya the country winning most awards at the event.
Organised by the African Investor, the awards recognise stock markets, regulators, listed companies, fund managers, stockbrokers and analysts of African equities.
The Africa Investor provides companies indices with independent benchmarks they need to “feel more confident about their investment and strategic decisions”.
It produces weekly, value-traded adjusted and market capitalisation-weighted indices.
The Ai 100 and Ai 40 Investors indexes capture the top 40 and 100 of the largest and most liquid publicly traded stocks across Africa ranking them by market capitalisation and by liquidity as measured by the average daily value traded in US dollars.
According to the Daily Nation while receiving the award, Safaricom’s chief investor relations officer Les Baillie said the award was a recognition that the company was on the right track after holding the IPO that added 840,000 new shareholders to the Kenyan stock market.
He said the public offering helped show that Kenya was still a good investing ground, even after it was hit by the post-election violence that followed last year’s General Election.
“Our shares are also trading well at the Nairobi Stock Exchange, and are consonant with the global trends.”
Equity bank director of corporate strategy Mary Wamae said the award was proof that its efforts to serve customers at the “lower end” of the market were bearing fruit.
“This award belongs to the Kenyans who now, through us, understand that owning a bank account is a right rather than a privilege as it used to be before,” said Ms Wamae, also a company secretary.
“To be able to serve customers at the lower end of the market shows that our business model that is supported by heavy investment in information technology is working.”
Currently, the bank has 2.7 million cash saving clients.
There are 500,000 others who are borrowers of the bank, she said.
By ITnewsAfrica.com Reporter
