The Exchange Nobody Told You About
West Africa's BRVM Composite Index Returned 25.26% in 2025. Most Global Portfolios Have Zero Exposure.
– 5 min read
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Over the preceding five years, the BRVM Composite Index rose 99.15%.
The data is not complicated.
A regional stock exchange headquartered in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, closed 2025 with a 25.26% gain in its Composite Index — reaching a new historic high of 345.75 points.
The exchange's total market capitalization at year-end stood at CFA 24,781 billion, approximately USD 40 billion, representing 18.37% of the gross domestic product of the West African Economic and Monetary Union.
The global investor community has spent years searching for uncorrelated, high-return emerging market exposure. The BRVM has been delivering it — consistently, with yield, at a P/E multiple competitive with peers.
The question every diaspora investor should be asking is straightforward: why is none of that in my portfolio?
The Numbers That Matter
The Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières — the BRVM — is the common stock exchange for eight WAEMU member states: Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo.
It operates under a single currency, the CFA franc, pegged to the euro, which eliminates the intra-regional currency risk that discourages many institutional allocators from African exposure.
The 2025 performance numbers were not an anomaly.
Over the past five years, the exchange reached annual returns of +39.33% (2021), +24.23% (2022), +5.38% (2023), +26.51% (2024), and +25.26% (2025).
Within the 2025 returns, performance was dispersed across indices: the BRVM Principal Index surged 57.59%, the Agricultural Index jumped 73.35%, and the BRVM Prestige and BRVM 30 posted gains of 25.61% and 19.82% respectively.
The 2025 Return Landscape
The top-performing individual equities in 2025 confirmed the structural depth of the rally.
Unilever Côte d'Ivoire (UNLC) appreciated 429% over the full year, driven by a corporate restructuring that saw its parent company divest 99.78% of its stake to local holding company SDTM-CI.
Safca Côte d'Ivoire (SAFC) gained 359%, with momentum concentrated in the second half of the year as industrial demand volumes surged. Uniwax Côte d'Ivoire (UNXC) returned 241%.
The gains were not purely speculative.
Annual trading turnover exceeded CFA 274.4 billion (approximately USD 472 million) in 2025. Dividends declared and largely paid in 2024 totaled nearly CFA 632 billion — approximately USD 1.09 billion — delivering real yields of between 7% and 8% on equity portfolios.
The average price-to-earnings ratio across the exchange stood at 13.01, consistent with competitive emerging market standards.
Banking, telecommunications, and consumer goods companies are the primary dividend-payers, with bank payout ratios typically ranging from 45% and above.
The macroeconomic backdrop reinforces the investment thesis.
WAEMU regional GDP growth reached an estimated 6.7% in 2025. Budget deficits across the zone narrowed from 8.4% in 2022 to 4.1% in 2025 — a fiscal consolidation trajectory that most Western economies have not achieved in over a decade.
