Good morning and warm welcome from AIRTIME to today's conference. It's the Poland on Air conference, and my name is Franziska, and I'm super excited to be here with you. We're gonna have many interesting roundtables of top companies here from Poland, and we're gonna start with a very interesting panel. We thought, "Why don't we ask the expert himself?" Tomasz Bardziłowski. I'm super excited. You are the CEO of the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Warm welcome to this panel discussion.
Yes. Thank you very much. I am really pleased to be here with you today in the morning. Well, it's great to be able to present to the viewers of Poland on Air a bit more details about the Polish capital market.
Before we dive into all the questions, I wanted to ask: What's currently on top of your mind when you think about the Warsaw Stock Exchange?
Well, I must say that when I speak with investors and we are proud with our recent achievements with this year's performance of the market. Until recently, Polish stock market has been the best performing current market in the world. We have right now a small correction, which might be a buying opportunity for those who are not yet there. The market has been performing extremely well, up over 30% year-to-date in złoty terms. Well over 40% in dollar terms, and with extremely increased turnover, which increased over 50%.
It seems there's a big increase in interest from international investors in Poland, and I think it has a strong backing with very strong macro data. GDP in Poland has been very strong last year over 3%. This year we are heading towards 3.5% stable economy. Also this rapidly, I would say, not yet an expensive stock market. We are very much excited that Poland is on radar screen, and this is something that it's for me a pleasure to talk about.
Yeah, it is. It's amazing. How do you see the Warsaw Stock Exchange evolving in the broader European capital markets landscape?
Yes. Well, the Warsaw Stock Exchange is like a second tier, I would say, exchange. It's not, of course, not as big as the main players like Deutsche Börse, Euronext, Nasdaq or SIX, but our market capitalization is EUR 200 billion. What we are saying is we are a rather liquid exchange. Our velocity ratio, i.e., the annual turnover to market cap is close to that of the Deutsche Börse. We list over 700 companies on two of our markets, main market, alternative market.
Well, we have IPOs and the equity capital market in terms of companies raising capital is quite vivid and active in Poland. I think we could be an example of a well-prospering mid-size or small exchange in Europe which is in a proper way addressing the needs of the local market.
How do you assess the current liquidity on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, especially in comparison to other European markets? What measures are being taken to enhance market depth and trading volume?
Yeah. That's of course the very important issue for also the management of the stock exchange to make sure the liquidity is there. As I said, our liquidity is quite high, comparable on relative terms, of course, not in absolute terms comparable to that of Deutsche Börse. I think what is important here is a good balance between domestic and international investors. Although we have in our trading almost 70% of turnover consists of international flow, we have relatively strong retail investor base, of which represents around between 15%-20% of the daily turnover. In some of segments of the market, especially medium small caps stocks, is much bigger.
Also what's important for us is that we provide such special incentives for market makers or also other traders who add the liquidity to the market and to the main stocks. Also we do a lot to increase liquidity in the smaller segment of the market. One of the few examples of what we've done, for example, we introduced a promotion for trading in ETFs. ETFs, exchange traded funds, are very important for us, especially those who are based on local indices. We introduced a zero trading fee for brokers for trading ETFs. Another initiative that I think it's interesting is that we sponsor a research coverage of smaller stocks.
Basically we pay for brokers running the program to write research on smaller cap stocks. There is right now 65 companies in this program. Also we pay for quarterly reports on our bond market and our alternative market.
Yeah. Thank you so much. I also remember that you launched several initiatives around technology, ESG, and regional positioning. Which of these areas do you think holds the most transformative potential over the next, let's say, two years?
Yes. Well, yes, we are undergoing a very important project for our stock exchange and the whole capital market. We are right now in the process of introducing a new trading system, our own proprietary trading system. Right now we are using a system which belongs to Euronext. This system is planned to be introduced this year in November. It will really open a new opportunities for us. First, it will be much, we'll have much bigger capacity. So, the capacity will be 4x-5x bigger.
We'll be able to cater for more new investors and will enable us to connect our bond trading platform with the equities trading platform. Right now many investors who trade only equities, they don't really have much access or easy access to our bond trading market. Also will enable us to accelerate development of new derivative products. This will be a big milestone in the history of Warsaw Stock Exchange, but also of Polish capital market. I think right now this is by far our most important project.
Great. In general, I would say we are seeing IPO activities slowing down across whole Europe, while private markets attract capital. What role do public markets need to play to stay competitive for growth?
Yes. That's a very important question, the question which is asked many times and recently and the answer that you hear is that the public market are not competitive enough, especially because of the cost of entering the market and cost of being a public company which is relatively high, much higher than it was in the past. What I think is also key is that we should have in mind that a public market is for a more mature companies for those who are able to that we need also a much more vibrant private markets including venture capital and private equity markets.
For that, we need more capital to enter those markets. Capital for scale up for the startups and capital for and also capital on the stock exchange for public market. What we say here in Poland that to develop our market first we need a more local institutional investors. This is the key both on the private market, i.e., VC and private equity, but also on the public market like pension funds and mutual funds.
Mm-hmm. Thank you so much. When it comes to international issuers and investors, as you know, AIRTIME is this platform that investors and issuers can meet. So interesting for me would be what do you think, what's the greatest potential that they could see in the Polish Stock Exchange, Warsaw Stock Exchange? Yeah.
In terms of the key potential, I believe it's still the market is not well developed. It's just 20% of GDP. Just to compare, the German capital market is over 50% of GDP. You may say that, German capital market is not as developed as in some Anglo-Saxon countries, but we have a big gap to fill.
This potential is something that we work on to realize. This can be done through addressing some issues, including that we have a huge base of retail investors, potential investors who so far have not really much exposure to capital markets. The size of the number of capital and savings that Polish households held on bank deposits is one of the highest in Europe.
We do a lot to propose initiatives for investors to think about the stock market that they can actually when investing in long term make more money in capital markets compared to bank deposits. One such initiative has been also proposed by Ministry of Finance. It is a new investment account, a personal investment account. In Polish, it is Osobiste Konto Inwestycyjne, OKI. The word is OKI. We hear a lot about OKI. An OKI account provides significant tax incentives, so up to PLN 100,000 , which is roughly EUR 22,000 . You can invest without tax.
Mm-hmm.
We believe that once this new account is introduced, it will definitely result into bigger interest and bigger inflows of retail investors to Polish capital market.
Yeah. Thank you so much for the answer. We have two more questions, and one is a little bit out of the box. What would you think from the top of your mind, what is the biggest misconception people have about the Warsaw Stock Exchange?
Well, yeah. That's a good question. I think that here at least in Poland for some years, because the market was not really performing that well, so the misconception was that you can make more money in real estate and investing by buying apartment, buying flats than investing in the stock market. I think that in long term you can also diversify better by having a good stock portfolio.
This is something where the education plays a big role to explain to investors, especially retail, that it makes sense to be diversified and to have exposure to stock market as a way to increase your wealth. Education will play a big part in this role to achieve this objective.
Last question before we dive into the Q&A session. If we would meet in two years, what would you think the Warsaw Stock Exchange have achieved by then?
Well, recently we celebrated a fact that our main index, WIG, the Warsaw Stock Exchange index, reached a symbolic level of 100,000. It, 35 years ago, it started at 1,000, so it's a huge increase over time. Recently, I read a few days ago an article, one of the analysts, and he said that he thinks that the main index will reach 200,000 in two years. Maybe this could be something to dream of. But definitely I hope that the market will be more mature with a steady flow of IPOs, with a big participation of retail investors, and the market that.
I would also like to hear about how Polish families, when they talk about money, they don't only talk about buying a new apartment, but they also talk about a dividend index level and also a stock market.
Thank you so much, Tomasz. It's so great to have your expertise here with us. We'll now open the stage to the Q&A session. To keep the conversation engaging, I kindly like to ask you to pose your question via the audio line. To do so, you can also just raise the Raise Your Hand button and just press on it, or you can also use the chat. Let me see if we received some questions. We haven't received a question yet. Everyone's so impressed. I mean, we're moving forward today, and for all of you also listening, we're moving forward with many roundtables. Actually, you're gonna do the first roundtable as well. We're all super excited for that. We have a big Q&A session.
If you would like to know more afterwards, you can always reach out to us, to AIRTIME. You can also reach out to the Warsaw Stock Exchange, of course. I think there's no question, so I'm very happy to end this wonderful panel discussion now. Thank you so much for being here, Tomasz. See you then in the roundtable with a different setting, but the same. Thank you also to our media partners, SunView and wallstreet:online . Keep an eye on that. There are gonna be many articles. I see you soon. Thank you so much for being here, Tomasz.
Thank you. Thank you, Franziska. Thank you.