Singapore's PrimePartners to launch index for Singapore-listed Chinese stocks

SINGAPORE (XFN-ASIA) - PrimePartners Corporate Finance Pte Ltd, a financial adviser, has created an index to track the performance of 25 Chinese companies listed here. The PrimePartners China Index will be available through the stock exchange's price feed from Monday. To begin with, it will not be calculated in real time. The PrimePartners China Index is meant to be a benchmark for investors as more and more Chinese stocks are traded on the exchange here, PrimePartners chairman Quek Peck Lim said. "One of seven shares traded daily comes from this segment. It is therefore important," Quek said. There were 105 Chinese companies listed here by last month, with combined market capitalization of 28.4 bln sgd, representing 5.9 pct of the exchange's market capitalization. "As they continue to grow in tradability, then it becomes important to have all these other derivatives and futures contracts, [as] additional liquidity pools for the market itself," said Quek.

The 25 companies in the index include COSCO Corp (Singapore), Pine Agritech and People's Food. The criteria used to chose them include market capitalization, trading volume, free float and industry representation. The composition of the index will be reviewed every six months. (1 usd = 1.58 sgd) yuinmunn.szetoh@xfn.com