Fiji’s only annual awards that recognise the importance of financial reporting to a business is returning after a break of six years. Organised and hosted by the South Pacific Stock Exchange (SPX), the SPX Annual Awards 2025 is about “Celebrating Impact” in corporate reporting excellence and capital markets development.
“It’s being revived because, one, the annual report is the number one tool through which a listed company and any company in Fiji communicates with their shareholders and stakeholders,” SPX chief executive officer Sheraj Obeyesekere said in an interview with this newspaper.
“So what we’re striving [to achieve] through the annual report awards is to better the level of corporate reporting in Fiji [and] over a period of time, bring it in line with international best practices, to increase transparency, to increase disclosure quality and more than anything recognise and reward companies that are doing extra and going above and beyond the requirements in putting out quality annual reports.”
Scheduled to take place at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva on Wednesday, the awards event will also feature the Capital Markets Development Awards, specifically intended to recognise stakeholder in the capital markets sector, which includes the stock market.
“The capital markets development awards is about recognising our stakeholders like the stock brokers, the investment advisors, that have made a difference in trading activity and in bringing more companies to market and made a difference in elevating the stock market performance so far in 2025,” Mr Obeyesekere said.
“So it’s quite an important initiative and directly linked to our objective of running a very transparent, free and orderly stock market in Fiji.”
Entries for the awards, now closed, were open to companies that are listed on SPX (listed companies) and those that are not listed (unlisted companies).
“We’ve seen a good response from listed companies and we are quite encouraged by the response we’ve received from unlisted companies, especially because it’s been after a few years,” Mr Obeyesekere said.
This year’s awards is the first since 2019, he added.
