February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. is the engine behind the NASDAQ OMX Ireland Index which was formally launched on July 28.
The launch date had been announced a few days earlier at a Business & Finance awards luncheon in Manhattan by NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. CEO, Bob Greifeld.
“The NASDAQ OMX Ireland Index will provide investors with a benchmark to track companies in a country that has experienced consistently high levels of economic growth,” said Greifeld.
“We are excited to extend our partnership with the NASDAQ OMX Group and have licensed the index in anticipation of listing a PowerShares Ireland ETF later this year,” said Bruce Bond, president and CEO of Invesco PowerShares Capital Management.
According to a NASDAQ release, Invesco, described as a leading provider of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), is expected to develop an ETF based on the NASDAQ OMX Ireland Index and list the ETF on The NASDAQ Stock Market.
The NASDAQ OMX Ireland Index will be calculated in real-time across the combined exchanges and will be disseminated in dollars. The Index began calculating on July 28, 2008 with a value of 250.00. The index will include companies with a combined market capitalization of about $97 billion.
According to the NASDAQ release, The NASDAQ OMX Ireland Index will also include companies that are listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market including Ryanair Holdings, a NASDAQ-100 Index company, and Skillsoft Corporation.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen has described the new index as “an indication of the continued satisfaction and confidence of U.S. investors that Ireland is a good place to do business and an excellent platform to access the EU market.”
Breandan O Caollai, the Irish Deputy Consul General in New York, told the San Francisco Business Times that the index amounted to “part of a very big and growing relationship.”
He said that the U.S. was Ireland’s second largest merchandise trade partner with a bilateral trade value of $31.5 billion last year. The trade and services value was $36.9 billion in 2006. O Caollai told the Business Times that the U.S. was important as a key investment and trade market for Ireland, and he explained that 47 new Irish companies opened offices in the U.S. in 2007.
There is now near parity between the number of jobs in Ireland provided by U.S. companies and jobs in the U.S. generated by Irish firms. Irish companies in the U.S. now employ 80,000 people and 474 U.S. multi-national companies employ 95,000 in Ireland.
The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc., according to the NASDAQ release, is the world’s broadest and most diverse exchange company. “It delivers trading, exchange technology, and public company services across six continents, and with over 3,900 companies, it is number one in worldwide listings among major markets.”