VIENNA (Reuters) - The Vienna bourse is continuing to cooperate with eastern European stockmarkets to ease investor access, but consolidation of the fragmented bourse landscape is unlikely, the bourse's chairman said on Wednesday.
Johannes Attems, Chairman of the bourse's supervisory board and Chief Executive of Oesterreichische Kontrollbank, said at the Reuters Central European Investment Summit that having a domestic stock market was still a matter of national pride.
"In the process (of regime change and building new nations) stock markets became part of a national identity just as soccer teams or flag carriers (airlines)," Attems said.
"I'm not trying to ridicule that. A few years ago we had an initiative from major issuers in Vienna asking why we don't merge with Frankfurt. Only when we explained they would just be a small cap in Frankfurt, a rethinking started," he said.
"That's why we support the regional approach."
The Vienna bourse owns a stake in the Budapest stockmarket operator and has tried to acquire other operators in the region.
But possible deals in Bulgaria and in Slovenia, where it is vying for the Ljubljana stockmarket along with OMX OMX.ST, Euronext ENXT.PA, Deutsche Boerse (DB1Gn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and the Warsaw and Milan stock markets, have proved elusive so far.
However, Vienna was still in a position to be a regional financial centre alongside Europe's main centers in Frankfurt and London, Attems said.
"Vienna not only has a tradition as place where you can do business with the region," he said. "We are not a direct competitor in many respects. Geographically we have moved from a marginal situation into a more central situation."
(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)
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