Emirates Post to buy 60% stake in Wall Street Exchange
Emirates Post Corporation, the country’s official postal services provider, has decided to buy a 60 per cent stake in Wall Street Exchange Centre’s operations in the UAE, Hong Kong and Britain.
Wall Street, which has nearly 10 branches in the UAE has another 10 in Hong Kong and London together. Gulf News was not able to reach officials of both EPC as well as Wallstreet for confirmation. Sources said a memorandum of understanding (MoU) has already been signed between the two for the deal, the value of which would be above $10 million (Dh36. 7 million). The deal will be concluded soon, according to sources.
A few months ago, the UAE government had announced its plan to sell a 40 per cent holding in Emirates Post to the public through an IPO.
Market experts said that EPC, which has been very active in the market for some time now, will be able to attract more investors to its IPO if it broadens its activities.
Recently, Emirates Post, which is already into courier services, tied up with Union National Bank (UNB) to offer the bank its premises to carry out retail banking operations.
Emirates Post, which is capitalised at Dh100 million, has announced a record net profit of Dh123 million for 2004 an increase of 20 per cent over the previous year. The company aims to improve its profit by another 12 per cent during the current year.
EPC, which is considered to be one of the best managed postal services outfits in the region, provided Bahrain’s postal company with an integrated IT system.
The officials of Emirates Post had earlier said there was a line-up of postal services Egypt, Oman, Syria, etc, where Emirates Post has plans to help establish state-of-the-art IT systems.
EPC has lined up a number of new initiatives for 2005 that will see the corporation consolidating its status on the regional and international map.
EPC network now consists of 77 post offices. Wallstreet Exchange Centre has a chain of exchange centres spanning the Middle East, Asian Sub-Continent, Europe, Far East Asia and America.
