CAIRO, 2 January 2004 — Almost all stock markets in the Middle East ended the year in positive territory, with Lebanon and Egypt scoring the highest gains in the last week of 2003 as their economies showed signs of recovery.
Beirut’s BSE index shot up 6 percent on the week to close on Tuesday, the last trading day of the year, at 457.16 points, its highest level since mid-2001, according to Banque Audi. Trading focused on shares of Solidere, the company rebuilding and managing the Beirut city center, and Cimenterie Nationale, the third-largest bank of the country. The bank said in its outlook for 2004, released Wednesday, that Lebanon’s foreign currency reserves climbed to a record $12 billion in 2003 thanks to a “positive investment climate” born from a successful donors’ conference in November 2002 to rescue the Lebanese economy.
In Egypt, the HFI index climbed 2.1 percent on the week, closing at 11,637.41 points Wednesday.
Stocks in Iran climbed on the back of the temporary detente between Tehran and the United States, motivated by last week’s massive earthquake in the southeastern Iranian city of Bam.
Tehran’s TEPIX stock index was up 1.8 percent on the week, closing 10,886.53 points on Wednesday.
Shares in Kuwait rose 1.7 percent on the week, closing at 4,790.20 points Wednesday. That marked the best annual performance in the history of the local bourse, the Arab world’s most capitalized after Saudi Arabia.
The KSE Index ended a staggering 101.7 percent up on the year.
In Saudi Arabia, the TASI all-share index climbed 1.5 percent on the week to close at 4,432.51 points Thursday. It is up 75.6 percent on the year, according to Bahrain-based Securities and Investment Company (SICO)’s weekly report.
Qatar was the only stock market in the region to end the week in the red. Its CBQ index shed 1.6 percent to close at 725.47 points Wednesday.
But SICO said that despite the “selling pressure” in the last week of 2003, the Doha bourse gained 69 percent during the year.
Oman’s MSM and the United Arab Emirates’ NBAD indices both gained 0.6 percent on the week, closing at 274.13 points and 4,501.90 points, respectively. Year on year, the MSM is up 42.1 percent and the NBAD is up 31.4 percent, according to SICO.
The Bahrain Stock Exchange index was up 0.5 percent on the week, driven only by shares of the banking sector, closing at 2,346.29 points Wednesday. It is up 28.2 percent on the year.
The Palestinian stock market’s Al-Quds index closed Tuesday at 177.90 points, up 0.8 percent on the week, and Jordan’s ASE index closed the same day at 261.45 points, almost unchanged on the week.