“The Bulgarian Stock Exchange, as well as the stock markets of our neighboring countries, have been experiencing liquidity problems. As far as Bulgaria is concerned I think the problem will persist for 2-3 more years,” Todor Breshkov, CEO First Investment Brokerage House said on the second day of the forum on The Future Of Capital Markets in Southeast Europe held in Sofia.

Together with economic success, trust in the management, and company quality, the fast result is the most important factors in order to attract foreign institutional investors.

The latter is of utmost importance in converting assets (equities for example) into their cash equivalent, Piotr Jechilovski, strategic analyst in London-based CA-IB explained.

The problem with liquidity is closely connected with the quality of issuers. The question at the moment, according to Breshkov, is how attractive will the forthcoming IPOs in Bulgaria be in terms of size. In his words, foreign influence in the IPOs held so far was between 16-17%.

Tsvetan Lajanski, CEO Devin AD said 50% of the stock offered in Devin's IPO was subscribed by foreign investors, most of them Austrian. He said his company follows a development strategy which does not include changing the majority shareholder.

With 826 transactions between 20 and 21 September, the stock of Devin was the most liquid emission on BSE last week, shows Central Depository data. There have been 283 transactions with the stock so far this week.

Last week there were a total of 7,512 transactions with the stock of the companies within BG40, versus 7,142 in the preceding week. This means 188 transactions per company on average, or 27 a day. We must also take into consideration that BG40 includes the most liquid Bulgarian companies.

The most liquid among them is the emission of Chimimport - 790 transactions for the period, followed by Eurohold Bulgaria, Stara Planina Hold, Lead and Zinc Complex, and Doverie United Holding, according to Profit.bg data.

Lead and Zinc Complex topped the chart of the top 5 most liquid companies in August with 2,344 transactions on the position. Eurohold Bulgraia ranked second with 2,066 deals, followed by Chimimport (1952), First Investment Bank (1,857), and Himko (1,730). The data comes from BSE monthly bulletin.

Chimimport, Eurohold Bulgaria and First Investment Bank have been in the chart over the past three months.