[2008-06-10]  Dar es Salaam Community Bank now goes public
Dar es Salaam Community Bank (DCB) will float its Initial Public Offer --IPO--, its Managing Director Professor Lucian Msambichaka said. The bank has already prepared a prospectus in line with pre-listing conditions as laid down by the Capital Markets and Securities Authority (CMSA), which has in turn approved it.

The IPO has also been endorsed by the Bank of Tanzania (BoT). The need for company's prospectus getting availed to public is often critical to IPOs because for the individual investor, it is tough to predict what the stock will perform on its initial day of trading and in the near future since there is often little historical data with which to analyse the company.

Like many other companies in transitory growth period, DCB is engaging in first sale of stock (IPO) to the public in a bid to seek capital to expand and eventually become publicly traded.

As such, the IPO is set to raise 1.5bn/-, although a provision has been put in the prospectus, and consented to by the regulator, for any oversubscriptions to be accepted for up to a maximum of 5 percent of the authorized share capital.

``This means that the IPO will fetch up to 2,000,000,150/-``, he said.


It is expected that stocks would be listed on Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange (DSE) on 18th August this year, ready for trading in this secondary market.

DCB becomes an eleventh stock player at the nascent DSE, bringing with it enhanced vibrancy at the bourse. The points of customer payments include all brokers at the DSE, all branches of the post office and DCB.

Six year's old DCB launched banking operations in 2002 when its deposits levelled at 1.76bn/-, but had shot up to 28bn/- by end of last year. The banking lending priority has focused small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through their organised groups.

Documents show that up to end of last year, loans of up to 5.9bn/-were given to SME-groups, thus benefiting 35,669 target customers, 78 per cent being women. Loans to private agents or persons reached 1.97bn/- by December 2007, with 73 per cent of this loan category going to men.

DCB`s salary loan scheme saw the bank lending up to 58.8bn/- for the period under review. Military personnel and prison police officers are said to be major beneficiary of this scheme, so far.

The bank's pre-tax profits reached 2.2bn/- last year, and the post-tax profits settled at 1.3bn/-, with 633m/- shared out as dividends.

Founding shareholders, the Ilala, Temeke and Kinondoni Municipalities received 439m/- as dividends. The balances were given to 2,626 other individual investors.


Source: (C) 2008 TANZANIA NEWS