The Botswana Stock Exchange (BSE), a government-owned regulator, has announced an improved financial performance for the year 2025, recording revenues of P78.8 million and a profit after tax of P20.6 million.
Among state-owned enterprises, the BSE stood out as one of the few that remained profitable last year. It declared dividends of P2.5 million and is now focused on executing a new strategy aimed at increasing its revenue tenfold by 2030.
The exchange’s revenue rose by P11.5 million, or 17.1 percent, climbing from P67.3 million in 2024 to P78.8 million in 2025. This growth was driven by a historic surge in equity trading turnover, new listings, and increased commissions. BSE’s revenue streams include listing and sustaining fees from issuers, commission and trading income, corporate actions fees, news publications, and members’ fees. Listing and sustaining fees saw the largest increase, surging by P6.4 million to reach P54.1 million in 2025. Commission income followed, generating P14.7 million, with corporate actions fees at P8.7 million, news publications at P1.3 million, and members’ fees at approximately P8,000. Profit for the year rose by P4.8 million, a 30.3 percent increase from P15.8 million in 2024.
Neo Mooki, Chairperson of the BSE Board, attributed the stronger financial results to strategic investments aimed at modernizing the exchange and boosting its resilience. “Our performance is clear from our financials, revenue increased by 17 percent, driven by higher volumes of listings, trading activities, and subsidiary business activities. We invested in systems, governance, and capabilities essential for a modern, resilient exchange. We believe today’s investments will drive stronger operating performance over time,” Mooki said. She emphasized that building the exchange Botswana needs requires deliberate and substantial investment.
These investments in information technology and personnel followed a significant network firewall failure in October 2025 that disrupted trading for four days, the longest market outage in BSE’s history, according to management. In response, the exchange has enhanced its IT team with new expertise. “We commissioned next-generation firewall capability and stood up the design for a modern data center with disaster recovery,” Mooki noted.
BSE CEO Aupa Monyatsi acknowledged the challenges posed by underinvestment in technology over the past decade. “We had not invested meaningfully in our IT for close to a decade. That under-investment caught up with us in 2025,” he said. Monyatsi expressed confidence in the exchange’s role in supporting Botswana’s economic growth and positioning the country as a capital-raising hub for Africa. “The conventional engines of growth are under pressure. The capital markets, well governed and well used, can unlock the resurgence we need. Not as a substitute for the rest of the economy, but as the connective tissue between savers, public ambition and private enterprise. The BSE is here to anchor that resurgence. We are also positioning Botswana, deliberately, as a capital-raising hub for Africa,” he stated.
Addressing liquidity concerns, Monyatsi revealed plans to introduce frameworks that discourage asset managers from buying equity solely to hold rather than trade. “There is a concentration problem in domestic capital as a large share of the activity on the exchange is intermediated by a small number of pension fund mandates, with a thin and reactive broker layer in front of them. The asset managers who hold these mandates have, on the whole, been buying to hold rather than trading. That dynamic compresses liquidity and, in turn, distorts price discovery,” he explained.
To broaden market participation, the BSE will soon launch a retail mobile and USSD platform designed to reduce barriers for ordinary citizens to open, fund, and trade accounts. “We will tokenize selected instruments, beginning with bonds. A government bond should not require close to one million pula to access. If a citizen with a modest wallet can fractionalize that exposure, we have built something genuinely democratic. The country has demonstrated that it has appetite and that it has wallets, even in a tight macro environment. Our job is to give that appetite a productive home,” Monyatsi concluded.