OMX’s Baltic exchanges announce the winners of the Baltic Market Awards

07.12.2006 VLN

Today (December 7), OMX’s exchanges in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius announced the winners of the first annual contest for the Baltic Market Awards recognizing the best practices in investor relations. TEO LT from Lithuania was awarded for the Best Investor Relations in the Baltic Countries, while Hansapank from Estonia won the title of Member of the Year.

The winners of the other categories were:
– Eesti Telekom: the Best Investor Relations of Tallinn Stock Exchange
– TEO LT: the Best Investor Relations of Vilnius Stock Exchange
– SAF Tehnika: the Best Investor Relations of Riga Stock Exchange, The Best Investor Relations among Small Cap Companies, and the Best Investor Relations Online.

Next year, a new prize category will be introduced, The Most Visible Improvement Over the Year.

Johan Rudén, President of the Baltic Market business unit at OMX, remarks: “The companies involved in the project benefit from increased awareness of the importance of disclosure quality, good investor relations and corporate governance practices. Each company was presented an analysis of its performance measured against the evaluation criteria and the best in the category, and now can work towards the necessary enhancements.”

While launching the contest in March of 2006, OMX’s Baltic exchanges envisaged two purposes: to identify and encourage the best Baltic market participants, and to improve the overall standard of investor relations among listed companies.

Both issuers and members were evaluated against specifically defined evaluation criteria so that results are unbiased.
Member evaluation was based on quantitative criteria related to their activity on the market – turnover in equity, turnover in fixed income, number of deals, etc.
Issuers were evaluated using only publicly available information in English and their evaluation was performed along five criteria groups:
– annual report,
– interim reports,
– ongoing corporate disclosures,
– company website,
– investor evaluation.

The members of the Evaluation Committee represent media, academics, investors and the stock exchanges. The company analysis was made by students from Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.

The results were unveiled at a special prize-giving ceremony with a video link-up between Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, enabling all audiences to simultaneously see the event and congratulate the winners.

For more information, please contact:

Tex Vertmann, Communications Manager
Tallinn Stock Exchange +372 640 8862

Krista Grintale, Corporate Communications Director
Riga Stock Exchange +371 7212431

Gintare Blazyte, Marketing and Communications Specialist
Vilnius Stock Exchange +370 5 272 13 71