Noting that there are thousands of multinationals operating in Thailand, SET executive vice president Vichate Tantiwanich said yesterday that officials had been talking about asking them to list on the local bourse for quite some time.

SET officials are now ready to study whether this would be feasible, he said.

Although local units of multinationals say they do not need to raise funds on the SET because they can obtain funds from their parent firms there are cases where such units list in other countries, Vichate said.

"Some of these companies have listed on other [regional] exchanges," he said, pointing to the Malaysia. The Malaysian exchange has a market capitalisation that is 1.5 times bigger than the SET's, but its trading volume is only half that of the Thai exchange, he said.

SET president Patareeya Benchapolchai said recently that the target is for the bourse's market capitalisation to be equivalent to the country's gross domestic product within five years.

The SET's market capitalisation is about Bt5.4 trillion now.

Vichate said officials would look for incentives to attract multinational units to the SET and identify regulatory or other obstacles that make a SET listing unattractive to them.

"If some rules can be relaxed to let these companies list, we will do that," he said.

However, if officials found it was not feasible to ask the firms to list on the SET they would look for other listing candidates, he added.

The SET earlier said it was considering Thai companies operating overseas as listing candidates. Amata (Vietnam), which operates the Amata City Bien Hoa, was reportedly interested.

Piyarat Setthasiriphaiboon

The Nation