MTS S.p.A said at its annual meeting Friday that its revenues grew by 8% in 2003, promoted by the launch of new markets and products, supporting its core businesses of cash and repo trading, and also by data sales to vendors, which were up by 26%.
MTS further strengthened its role in the European fixed-income market in 2003 by exporting its domestic market model to additional countries, launching MTS Austria and MTS Greece and thereby completing its presence across all 11 eurozone bond markets.
Beyond the eurozone, MTS launched MTS Denmark, NewEuroMTS (a market for trading debt of the 10 new states of the European Union) and entered into agreements with Poland and Israel to open domestic MTS markets in those countries in 2004.
Meanwhile, turnover on MTS markets remained robust with daily average volumes rising a combined 10.7%, the company said. Especially significant was a 14% increase in volume on the repo market, which resulted in EUR 12.6 trillion traded for the year, and a more than 75% surge for both turnover and the number of participants on the BondVision dealer-to-client market. Through new markets and new participants, MTS has been able to lower the unit cost per trade on the inter-dealer system by 29% year on year since 2001, the company said.
In addition to expanding its proven domestic market model to other European countries, MTS moved into complementary businesses, including the EuroMTS Index, which was launched in May 2003 in response to the need for an independent, real-time pan-European government bond index, MTS said. The Index, based upon actual prices traded on the MTS markets, garnered interest from institutional investors who recognized the benefits of transparency, reliability and its easily replicable structure, the company said. The introduction of the Index was followed by the creation of two exchange-traded funds (ETFs), traded on Euronext Paris and Borsa Italiana, by a leading ETF manager in the first half of 2004, MTS said.