**Table 5.3  Characteristics of corporate bond markets**

|Country|Tally of corporate<br>bonds listed on the<br>local securities<br>exchange|Amount of total<br>outstanding<br>corporate bonds as<br>% of GDP|Annual turnover<br>ratio of corporate<br>bonds (%) /a|Corporate bonds<br>issued by<br>infrastructure providers<br>as % total outstanding|Maximum term of<br>corporate bonds<br>outstanding (years)|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||end-2006|2006|2006|end-2006|end-2006 or end-<br>April 2007 /b|
|Benin|3|1.1|2.5|94|7|
|Burkina Faso|2|0.7|1.5|100|6|
|Côte d’Ivoire|0|0|0|n.a.|n.a.|
|Ghana|3|0.5|0.1|0|5|
|Kenya /c|8|0.5|—|51|7|
|Mozambique|6|0.3|0.9|55|10|
|Namibia|9|7.1|19.9|65|10|
|Nigeria|3|0.1|0.0|0|8|
|Senegal|2|0.8|1.5|93|7|
|South Africa|563|13.3|351.1|20|27|
|Tanzania|6|0.4|1.1|0|10|
|Uganda|3|0.3|0.3|58|10|
|Zambia|4|0.2|0|43|12|

Sources: Corporate bonds data are sourced from national stock exchanges and other national sources.

Note: At the end of 2006, corporate bonds had not been issued in Cape Verde, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, or Rwanda. Cape Verde’s market was launched with a debut issue by electricity generation utility Elektra in mid2007. Data are not available for Cameroon or Sudan.

a. Bond turnover ratio is defined as the ratio of annual trading volume to outstanding corporate bonds at year-end.

b. For countries listing bonds on the Bourse régionale des valeurs mobilières (BRVM)—Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal—the applicable date for outstanding bond amounts is April 30, 2007. Côte d’Ivoire’s transport, storage, and shipping company, Saga CI, had a bond issue that traded in 2006.

c. According to the Nairobi Stock Exchange, the current system does not provide separate information on corporate and government bond turnover. For several reasons, including a lack of product diversity and the small size and number of corporate bond issues, most corporate bonds are held to maturity and rarely traded.

— = Not available; n.a. = Not applicable.

Outside South Africa, the few focus countries that had corporate bonds listed on their national or regional securities exchange at the end of 2006 had only a handful of such listings, and the amounts issued were small. Only three corporate bond issues by two issuers were listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, prompting the formation of a Bond Market Steering Committee (BMSC) to encourage bond market development as a key priority for overall national economic development.<sup>59</sup> The extent to which corporate bonds finance infrastructure across the countries varies, although there seems to be an emerging trend of new issuers operating in infrastructure sectors coming to the market. In at least one case, an infrastructure entity made the market’s debut issue.<sup>60</sup> The share of corporate bonds outstanding that had been issued to finance infrastructural development exceeded 50 percent in 7 of the 12

> 59 Between 1990 and 1992, there were 40 corporate bonds issued in the Nigerian bond market. Between 1999 and 2006, there were only 11 such issues (Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission).

60 The first corporate bond issued and listed on the Cape Verde stock exchange, in mid-June 1997, was by the electrical utility Elektra. It was well received by investors, being six times oversubscribed (Bolsa de Cape Verde).

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