West Africa stock exchange Anticipates a Boom in Listings

West Africa’s stock exchange, BRVM is expecting a boom in listings as it targets the region’s telecoms firms and partnerships with international clearing houses to attract more foreign investors, said its CEO on Wednesday.

The telecoms companies make some of the largest companies in West Africa and the Abidjan-based bourse. The latter lists Burkina Faso’s Onatel and Senegal’s Sonatel. The stock market hopes they will go public as a way to keep revenues in domestic hands.

Edoh Kossi Amenounve, BRVM boss told Reuters an interview on the sidelines of an investor conference in London that the only way to share revenue with the population is to list the companies.

The stock exchange has already made it apparent that it would list Mali’s Societe Telecom du Mali (Sotelma) – main mobile operator – this year.

South African telecoms firm MTN is currently preparing for major initial public offerings of MTN Ghana and MTN Nigeria on the Ghanaian and Nigerian stock exchanges respectively, and Amenounve suggests it consider listing West African subsidiaries such as MTN Cote d’Ivoire on BRVM at a later date.

He also suggested French telecoms group Orange should consider listing its Ivory Coast subsidiary…Read more

Facebook to Introduce Clear History – a Feature Showing Websites that Track You

Facebook on May 2 announced that it will start telling users which websites track them across the online platform and offer the option to delete the personal data from their accounts.

The site gathers information on the application’s users and non-Facebook users from third-party websites that use Facebook’s services. For instance, the “Like” plug-in or Facebook “pixels,” – the bits of code that tracks what people do off from the app.

The new feature dubbed Clear History is expected to roll out in a few months and it will essentially let all users identify or see and clear the information Facebook knows about their browsing history.

“To be clear, when you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse. You may have to sign back into every website, and you may have to reconfigure things. The same will be true here. Your Facebook won’t be as good while it relearns your preferences,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post to his personal account.

He also added that after going through their systems, the feature is an example of the kind of control people should have.

“It’s something privacy advocates have been asking for — and we will work with them to make sure we get it right,” Mark said. …Read more