As communicated by Borsa İstanbul in its announcement on 2 October 2019, Borsa İstanbul made amendments to the legislation for the implementation of the new equity market structure, listing criteria and trading principles. The amendments came into force on 4 November 2019. The amendments were made in the Equity Market Directive, Equity Market Procedure and the Listing Directive.

The amendments in the Equity Market Directive reflect the announced changes in the equity market structure, new criteria for trading in groups and the definitions of these criteria. As per the amendments, shares listed and traded in the relevant market as per the criteria set out in the Listing Directive will be reevaluated at least twice each year in accordance with the criteria bellow and their group will be changed accordingly:

The terms mentioned in table are defined as follows:

1. Market Cap means total market cap calculated based on the company's total capital.
2. Market Cap of Shares in Free Float means market cap of the shares of the company in actual free float (calculated according to the criteria determined by the Capital Markets Board (“CMB”)) as the free floating shares at the end of a defined period times the average of the one-year adjusted closing prices.
3. FFR means the ratio of the shares of the company in the actual free float (calculated according to the criteria determined by the CMB) to the company’s paid in capital.
4. Number of Domestic Individual Investors means the average number of domestic individual investors owning at least TRY 500 worth shares in the last year according to the Central Repository Agency (“CRA”) data.
5. Domestic funds means average net asset value of the share of the equity in the portfolios of the Investment Funds and Pension Funds under the CMB’s supervision, according to CRA data.
6. Liquidity means the rate of change in the average daily price of the share with a volume of TRY 1 million.

As a general principle, each share has to fulfill all the criteria of the relevant market and the sub segment in which it is classified; however, there are two exceptions to this rule:

1. If a company that is not traded in Star Group 1 but has free float shares above TRY 500 million, it will be traded under Star Group 2 regardless of other criteria;
2. Companies that are traded under Main Group 2 with free float shares over TRY 15 million and having a dividend return greater than 15% will be traded under BIST Main Group 1. “Dividend return” is defined as “(total net cash dividend for the last 3 years) / (market cap at the end of the period)”.

Listing requirements for the Star Market and the Main Market were also amended via the amendments made in the Listing Directive:

• For BIST Star Group 1, Free-Float Market Value requirement was increased from TRY 250 million to TRY 1 billion, while the Free-Float Percentage requirement of at least 5% was removed.
• For BIST Star Group 2, Free-Float Market Value requirement was increased from TRY 100 million to TRY 150 million.
• For BIST Main Group 1, Free-Float Market Value requirement was decreased from TRY 50 million to TRY 30 million.
• The criteria for BIST Main Group 2 was removed entirely.