Good morning!
The biggest company on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange just became its newest tradable name. Ethio Telecom completed its listing this week, with 96 percent of its shareholders verified and now free to buy and sell. That alone would make a busy Monday, but the week kept stacking plates.
The Council of Ministers cleared a wave of reform legislation in a single sitting: insurance, federal tax administration, and statistics all got drafts approved and pushed to Parliament. The National Bank kept loosening its grip on foreign exchange, handing banks the power to approve Letters of Credit on their own and reopening the door to Franco Valuta imports.
It also lined up USD 200 million for June auctions. Out on the international front, the bondholders said no again. In crypto, Telegram’s Wallet became the latest platform to back out of the birr. And the tech desk filled up fast: Yango Tech landed on the continent in Kigali, Arifpay launched a digital schools ecosystem, and a US-listed miner quietly turned its Ethiopian power into a data-centre revenue line.
Grab your buna. There is a lot on the plate this morning.
Capital Market Spotlight
Ethio Telecom lists on the ESX as 96% of shareholders clear verification
The exchange just got its heavyweight. Ethio Telecom has officially listed on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange, and the company confirmed that 96 percent of the investors who bought into last year’s IPO have completed verification and can now trade their shares on the secondary market.
The numbers tell the story of how big this base is. Out of 47,377 Ethiopian investors who purchased shares, roughly 45,000 have fully cleared the verification process and can now sell, transfer, and manage their holdings. The remaining 1,646 investors, about 3.4 percent, are still pending, held up by missing or incomplete National ID (Fayda) details, and will be cleared once they submit the required documents. Separately, 248 foreign investors who bought shares were not approved, and their payments are being refunded. CEO Frehiwot Tamiru explained that the verification took time precisely because so many shareholders had gaps in their records, but confirmed that allocation and approval are now complete and that the Capital Market Authority has signed off on the listing.
Here is why it matters. Ethio Telecom does not just join the board; it reshapes it. Wegagen (WGBX), Gadaa (GDAB), and Awash (AWAB) brought tens of thousands of shareholders between them. Ethio Telecom brings tens of thousands more in a single name, and a household brand that almost every Ethiopian recognises. A market that has spent its first year educating the public about what a share even is now has the country’s most familiar company sitting on the trading floor. That is exactly the kind of liquidity and confidence anchor a young exchange needs, and it is the clearest sign yet that the IPO-to-listing pipeline actually closes the loop. Source: Tikvah / Stockmarket.et
Reform Desk
Council of Ministers clears insurance, tax, and statistics drafts in one session
The Council of Ministers held its 55th regular session this week and moved an unusually heavy legislative load, approving and forwarding several draft proclamations to the House of People’s Representatives after what the government described as extensive deliberation. Three of them speak directly to the plumbing of the financial and data economy.
The draft insurance proclamation is the headline for the financial sector. The government has argued for some time that insurance needs its own strong, updated legal framework to sit alongside the banking and capital-market reforms already underway, and this draft is built to provide it. The emphasis is on protecting customers, clarifying the rights and obligations of policyholders, and bringing intermediaries, the brokers and agents, under clearer regulation. Insurance has been the quiet member of Ethiopia’s liberalisation story; this draft moves it toward the same competitive, consumer-protected footing the rest of the sector is being pushed onto.
The second piece amends the Federal Tax Administration Proclamation (No. 983/2016). A lot has changed in the economy since the current framework took effect, and the amendment focuses on the procedural side: new mechanisms to resolve tax disputes fairly, peacefully, and efficiently, plus provisions to strengthen accountability and transparency in collection and to harden enforcement. For businesses, the dispute-resolution language is the part to watch, because predictability in how tax cases are handled is its own form of investment climate.
The third, a draft statistics proclamation, flew lower but matters for everyone who reads Ethiopian economic data. Officials said it would safeguard the professional independence of the national statistical service, lift data quality, and align practice with international standards, with reporting obligations extending to private-sector data holders. Better, more independent numbers are the foundation everything else in this newsletter is measured against. Source: Office of the Prime Minister / The Reporter
FX & Trade
NBE hands banks the keys: Letters of Credit and Cash Against Documents no longer need prior approval
The National Bank kept its foreign-exchange liberalisation moving with a public notice on 25 May amending FX Directive FXD/01/2024. The headline change: commercial banks can now approve Letters of Credit and Cash Against Documents arrangements on their own, without seeking prior NBE approval, and LC fees are being standardised and reduced.
This is a bottleneck removal, plain and simple. Under the old setup, trade-finance approvals routed back through the central bank, adding time and cost to every import transaction. Pushing that authority down to the banks, and trimming the fees attached, is the kind of administrative reform that does not make dramatic headlines but quietly lowers the cost of doing cross-border business. It is a direct continuation of the market-based FX regime Ethiopia adopted in July 2024.
Franco Valuta reopens for selected goods, with digital monitoring attached
In the same spirit, the NBE issued a new directive allowing Franco Valuta imports, goods brought in without drawing on the formal FX system, for a defined list including investment inputs, raw materials, technology equipment, and certain commercial products. The catch, and it is a deliberate one, is tighter digital monitoring and compliance built into the framework. The intent is to channel goods and informal foreign currency into productive, traceable use rather than leaving a loophole, which is the balance the central bank has been trying to strike across the whole reform.
USD 200 million lined up for June FX auctions
Rounding out the FX week, the NBE released its auction schedule for the fourth quarter of FY 2025/26, allocating USD 200 million to be deployed in June through two sessions of USD 100 million each, on 9 June and 24 June. The auctions remain part of the IMF-backed reform program, and recent rounds have been clearing in the 153 to 155 birr per dollar range. The structured, published-in-advance approach is itself the point: predictability lets banks and importers plan, even as businesses keep reporting that demand still outruns supply. Source: NBE / Capital
Debt
Bondholders reject the latest restructuring offer, again
The week’s reminder that the new financial system does not erase the old one’s obligations: a committee representing holders of Ethiopia’s USD 1 billion Eurobond rejected the government’s latest restructuring proposal, which involved a 12 percent haircut on the principal. The bond has been in default since December 2023, and each rejected proposal extends that standoff.
The gap is about loss-sharing. Ethiopia wants a haircut consistent with the relief it is negotiating with official and bilateral creditors; the bondholders want terms closer to whole. Until the two sides converge, the default lingers as a cloud over the very reform story everything else this week is building, the FX liberalisation, the listings, the institutional confidence. The second engine of the economy is revving on the trading floor, but the first one is still carrying this debt.
Crypto & Digital Infrastructure
Telegram’s Wallet pulls the birr from P2P trading
Telegram’s built-in crypto platform, Wallet, announced it will suspend Ethiopian birr peer-to-peer trading starting 2 June, joining Binance, OKX, Bybit, and others that have already wound down crypto services tied to Ethiopia. The throughline is regulatory pressure: the National Bank banned crypto for payments back in 2022, and the formal channels for moving birr in and out of crypto keep narrowing. Trading does not vanish when a platform exits; it migrates to less visible venues, which is precisely the supervision problem regulators are weighing.
SOLAI turns Ethiopian power into a data-centre revenue line as mining fades
A telling snapshot of where crypto infrastructure is heading: US-listed SOLAI (NYSE: SLAI) reported its 55-megawatt Ethiopian data centre generated USD 3.3 million in its first quarter of operation, a major driver of the company’s USD 7.9 million in Q1 revenue. Meanwhile its self-mining revenue collapsed to USD 0.2 million from USD 3 million a year earlier, after it shut down DOGE and LTC machines on weak prices and produced just 2.4 bitcoin for the quarter. The company is openly repositioning from crypto miner to AI and data-services operator, with Ethiopia and Ohio as its two anchors. For Ethiopia, the interesting part is the model: cheap hydropower being monetised as compute and hosting capacity rather than pure mining, the kind of energy-to-digital-infrastructure trade the country has signalled it prefers. Source: Birr Metrics
Tech Desk
Yango Tech lands on the continent, unveiled in Kigali
Yango Group launched its B2B technology division, Yango Tech, into the African market this week, with the reveal staged in Kigali. The pitch is a pivot from the consumer ride-hailing brand most people know toward AI and digital-infrastructure solutions sold to enterprises, municipalities, and government agencies, with dedicated applications spanning fleet management, smart-city tools, digital healthcare, e-commerce, and financial services.
What separates the pitch from a software catalogue is the consulting wrapper: Yango Tech says it will help organisations identify where AI generates measurable value, build implementation roadmaps, assess ROI, integrate tools into daily workflows, and design governance frameworks and training. Chief Business Officer Adeniyi Adebayo framed African demand for automation, infrastructure modernisation, and practical AI as accelerating. The market data backs the ambition: McKinsey estimates generative AI alone could add USD 61 to 103 billion in annual economic value across Africa, with over 40 percent of African enterprises already deploying some form of AI, while GSMA puts the transport sector’s contribution at USD 220 billion in 2024, rising toward USD 270 billion by 2030. The rollout builds on pilots in South Africa and Mozambique across transport, healthcare, and e-commerce, and on Yango’s earlier Mobility-as-a-Service work in Central Asia, including real-time ambulance tracking. For Ethiopia, the relevant question is whether a player like this targets Addis next, and on what terms. Source: Yango Group
Arifpay and partners launch ArifSchool
On the homegrown side, Arifpay teamed up with AIT, Gebeya, and EducationMatters to launch ArifSchool in Addis Ababa, an integrated digital-education ecosystem that bundles AI learning tools, school management systems, and digital payments into one stack. The logic is the same one driving fintech everywhere: meet a sector where it already transacts. Schools handle fees, records, and now learning content; putting all three on a single rail, with payments as the anchor, is a clean way to digitise an ecosystem that has stayed largely manual.
Transport
Every licensed driver to be retested under a new digital system
The Ministry of Transport and Logistics signed an agreement launching the National Driver Competency Assessment, Training and Safety Improvement Project, a fully digital platform covering driver registration, training, assessment, and certification. Under it, all currently licensed drivers will have to complete fresh training and a formal evaluation, with continued eligibility tied to meeting updated competency standards. Commercial drivers come first, and the program, signed by State Minister Bareo Hassen and developed jointly with the Ministry of Labour and Skills, is pitched as a road-safety measure aimed at cutting the fatalities, injuries, and economic losses that traffic accidents generate each year. The digital backbone is the quiet reform here: moving licensing onto a single transparent platform is also a fraud-and-forgery fix in a system long criticised for manual workarounds. Source: Ministry of Transport and Logistics / Birr Metrics
That is your Monday Breakfast Stories for this week. Ethio Telecom’s giant shareholder base joined the trading floor, the Council of Ministers cleared insurance, tax, and statistics drafts in a single session, the National Bank handed banks control of Letters of Credit and reopened Franco Valuta while lining up USD 200 million for June auctions, the bondholders rejected another restructuring offer, Telegram’s Wallet exited the birr, Yango Tech and ArifSchool added to the AI-and-infrastructure push, SOLAI turned Ethiopian power into data-centre revenue, and every licensed driver is headed back for retesting.
The reform machine is moving on almost every front at once, building the markets, easing the trade rails, modernising the data. The debt standoff is the reminder that the old obligations have to be settled for the new system to stand clean. Both are true at the same time.
Keep your coffee strong and See you next Monday. ☕
