AccessKenya holds its first ever Annual General Meeting as a listed company today.

Long term investors in the only information technology firm listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) will certainly have something to smile about.

Since listing at the bourse in June, last year, AccessKenya has employed sound growth strategies driven by acquisitions and robust earnings in the face of competition and a rapidly changing ICT sector.

AccessKenya has registered a year to date gain of 44 per cent on its share price since its debut at Sh10 in a highly publicised initial public offering last year. The firm closed yesterday's trading session at a robust Sh32, over three times the value of its listing offer.

At the NSE, only Equity Bank outshines AccessKenya in terms of performance with a year to date price increase of 64 per cent.

Earlier in the year, while most firms in the service, manufacturing, agriculture and financial sectors dipped as a result of direct or indirect impact by the post election turmoil, AccessKenya held firm, registering a 14.63 per cent one month rise in the month of January.

"AccessKenya has been a defensive stock owing to the sort of industry-ICT-that it operates in, making it somewhat immune to the shocks that have hit firms in other sectors," said Ken Kaniu, investment manager at Stanbic Investment Management Services in an earlier interview with the Business Daily.

Even as the stock market remained subdued in January, stock pickers say on some days, 90 per cent of the trades on the counter have been foreign buys making AccessKenya one of the cherry picks at the bourse. One factor that analysts say has made AccessKenya remain stable since listing has been the heavy presence of high net worth and institutional investors on the counter.

The AccessKenya IPO was the first to introduce the Qualified Institutional Investors (QII) category in an initial offering. It was brought about by the need to distinguish between corporates who want to buy shares for themselves and those that are buying on behalf of others while keeping the share register lean.

QII ensures that corporates that fall under this category get a larger allocation than others. Since AccessKenya listed, other firms that have had an IPO to date- Kenya Re and Safaricom-have included the QII category in their allocations of shares.

While debate had raged over the introduction of the QII segment and the heavy allocations to this category, the stability of the AccessKenya IPO over the past one year has made a strong case for their inclusion.

Detractors of AccessKenya's allocation policy pointed at the possibility of low volumes that would be moved daily, owing to the trading habits of large investors who usually have a long term view of the market. But a year later and an average of 800,000 AccessKenya shares changing hands daily since listing, the argument that QIIs would result in low liquidity levels on the counter seems to hold no weight.

What holds substantial weight however, is while having in mind the widest possible investor participation in the market, allocation policies that favour small individual investors as opposed to collective sets of investors do more harm than good to a counter. The Kengen IPO in May, 2006 remains the best casing point for botched allocation policies.

During the Kengen IPO, institutions such as mutual funds and pension funds- now considered QIIs-were short changed in the allocation process receiving a paltry number of shares despite the large investor pool represented in their schemes.

The bias towards individual investors also moved to depress Kengen's share price at the NSE as the counter became exposed to speculative trading synonymous with the euphoria of new investors at the bours e Market players have hailed the formation of vehicles such as unit trusts which are meant to encourage investors to invest in pools.

While the number of investors at the NSE has grown to more than a million in the last two years from 80,000 prior to the Kengen IPO, the value of shares at the NSE fails to mirror that of the Johanesburg stock exchange which has far fewer CDS accounts.

Said Chris Mwebesa, chief executive officer of the NSE during the launch of Suntra Investment Bank's unit trust last month, 'We need to ask ourselves whether we are really empowering our people when it comes to investing."