Pakistan included in MSCI Frontier Market Index: Daily Times

By Tanveer Ahnmed

KARACHI: Pakistan has been included in Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Frontier Market Index with the inclusion of twelve Pakistani companies in it.

Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI), a leading provider of benchmark indices, announced the results of its May 2009 Semi Annual Index Review for the MSCI Equity Indices Thursday.

The Pakistan index – first inducted in the MSCI Index series in February 1994 was removed from Emerging Market (EM) Index in December 2008 mainly due to restrictions on normal trading by placing the floor in August last year.

“Removal of the price floor in mid December and subsequent smooth functioning of the equity markets propelled Pakistan’s inclusion in the Frontier Index,” believe the analysts Muzzamal Aslam and Farhan Rizvi at JS Research.

They also believed that Pakistan would occupy a relatively higher representation in the MSCI Frontier Index (2.0-2.5 percent) as against only 0.14 percent in the MSCI EM Index prior to its exclusion.

The Pakistani stocks that have been included in MSCI are MCB, NBP, UBL, NIB, OGDC, POL, PSO, KAPCO, HUBCO, FFC, JSCL & PTC having the combined weight of 45 percent in KSE-100 index, the benchmark of Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE).

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