Egypt’s stock market indices jump on coronavirus vaccine hopes

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By Yomna Yasser
Egypt’s stock exchange (EGX)
Egypt’s stock exchange (EGX)

Gains on global shares have propelled Egypt’s stock exchange’s (EGX) indexes ending higher on Tuesday, with the benchmark EGX 30 index surging 2.20 percent to 11,077 points.

That rounds off a day of soaring share prices worldwide, after Pfizer and BioNTech reported early on Monday that their coronavirus vaccine had been found to be more than 90 percent effective in a third-phase trial.

“The mRNA-based vaccine candidate demonstrated evidence of efficacy against COVID-19 in participants without prior evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, based on the first interim efficacy analysis conducted on November 8, 2020 by an external, independent Data Monitoring Committee (DMC) from the Phase 3 clinical study,” Pfizer said in a statement.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has welcomed later on Monday the coronavirus vaccine news, describing it as ‘encouraging’.

“We welcome the encouraging vaccine news from Pfizer and BioNTech Group and salute all scientists and partners around the who are developing new safe, efficacious tools to beat COVID19.” Ghebreyesus said on Twitter.

The EGX 70 EWI index of the leading smaller and mid cap enterprises (SME) grew 2.07 percent to 1,953 points, while the fixed-weighted index, EGX 30 Capped advanced 2.37 percent to 13,088 points. The all-embracing index, EGX 100 added 2.30 percent higher to 2,863 points. Meanwhile, the equal weights index, EGX 50 inched up 2.64 percent to 2,092 points.

Market Cap   

Total market capitalisation has posted gains worth 9.2 billion Egyptian pounds ($588.7 million) to close at 627.945 billion pounds on Tuesday.

Trading Aggregates      

Also on Tuesday, the trading value has approximately reached 2.1 billion pounds, while the trading volume has almost recorded 487.3 million securities executed 55,000 transactions.

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