2010-05-21 11:32

Leading financial markets operator NYSE Euronext is interested in listing on Shanghai's imminent international board.

"We have held several rounds of talks with Chinese regulators about listing on the international board, but we are not in a position to decide the timetable," Duncan Niederauer, chief executive officer of NYSE Euronext, said in Shanghai yesterday.

He said a lot of multinational companies listed on its exchange had expressed interest in the Shanghai international board.

"China has conducted many reforms on the equity market recently and we expect the international board will be the next one, which is likely to be launched later this year or early next year," he said.

China has completed draft rules for the listing and trading of overseas companies on the international board at the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

It is part of China's efforts to position Shanghai as a global financial hub by 2020.

"Shanghai and China are playing increasingly pivotal roles in the broader economic recovery," Niederauer said.

"The findings of our latest survey of global CEOs found that six in 10 CEOs believe China will lead the global economic recovery, while more than four in 10 believe China is strategically the most crucial region for business through 2011 and beyond."

Eighty-eight companies on the Chinese mainland are listed on NYSE Euronext, with 14 of them joining the market since November 2009.

Niederauer also said that all United States stocks were likely to be subject to circuit-breaker action by the end of this year as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission's efforts to avoid repeating the May 6 market slump.

American stocks plunged 9 percent in the last two hours of trading on May 6 before clawing back some of the losses as a suspected trading glitch hit.

A circuit breaker is a mechanism to suspend a stock from trading for five minutes when it declines more than 10 percent within five minutes.

It would initially apply to stocks on Standard & Poor's 500 Index and exchange-traded funds were likely to be added later, he said.

NYSE Euronext is also a provider of innovative trading technology.

Its boards in Europe and the US trade in equities, futures, options, fixed-income and exchange-traded products.