ASTANA: Kazakhstan's national grid and postal companies will be first to float shares when the Central Asian state launches a “people's IPO” to kick-start the domestic stock market, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said Friday. Nazarbayev, in power for two decades, instructed his government to float shares by the end of this year in grid company KEGOC, postal company Kazpost and Samruk-Energo, the power-generation unit of sovereign wealth fund Samruk-Kazyna. State oil and gas company KazMunaiGas, uranium miner Kazatomprom and national rail monopoly Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ) should follow up with initial public offerings in 2012 or 2013, he said. “The ‘people's IPO' will give hundreds of thousands of ordinary Kazakhstani citizens the opportunity to own shares in major enterprises,” Nazarbayev told a congress of his ruling Nur Otan political party. Kazakhstan is the world's largest uranium miner and holds more than 3 percent of the world's recoverable oil reserves. Its $140 billion economy, the largest in Central Asia, is estimated to have grown 7 percent in 2010, faster than neighbor Russia's. Its plan to privatize major state firms comes after three Russian resource companies pulled London listings worth more than $3.5 billion this week, having failed to attract enough demand from investors. High valuations, market uncertainty following unrest in Egypt and a bulging pipeline of expected deals have reduced the appetite for private Russian issuers, bankers and analysts say. Nevertheless, investor demand has been strong for exposure to Kazakhstan, which has no sovereign Eurobonds outstanding. A $700 million, 10-year Eurobond issued last year by KTZ, the rail monopoly, was heavily oversubscribed. Kazakhstan's privatization drive will be focused on its domestic exchange, offering its 16.4 million population exposure to a national industrialization plan that envisages a one-third expansion of the economy by 2020. Nazarbayev, who will run again for the presidency in a snap election on April 3, said ordinary citizens should be allowed to share in Kazakhstan's wealth. He warned against a repeat of the 1990s, when state property fell into the hands of a select few. “We attempted this for the first time at the dawn of our independence,” he said.
