There is a list that nobody in Zimbabwe's financial establishment has been eager to read aloud, so let us read it here. Since 2020, the following companies have either delisted from the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange or migrated away from it entirely: Padenga Holdings, Simbisa Brands, National Foods, Axia Corporation, Bindura Nickel Corporation, Innscor Africa, Seed Co Zimbabwe, Edgars Stores, First Capital Bank, African Sun, Zimplow Holdings, Bridgefort Capital, National Tyre Services, and Econet Wireless Zimbabwe. The Old Mutual ZSE Top Ten Exchange Traded Fund, unable to track an index that kept disappearing beneath it, wound itself up. And First Mutual Properties has signalled it is next.
That is not a list of struggling companies looking for the exit. That is a list of some of the most recognisable names in Zimbabwean corporate life, each one making the same calculation and arriving at the same answer. The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, founded in 1896 and a survivor of wars, hyperinflation, and six currency collapses, is no longer the place serious Zimbabwean businesses want to be.
The question is why. And the answer is more uncomfortable than any of the official commentary has been willing to acknowledge.
To understand the delistings, you have to start not with the stock exchange but with the currency. The ZSE has always traded in Zimbabwe's legal tender. For most of its history, that was a stable enough foundation. Then came the hyperinflation of 2007 to 2009, which effectively vaporised the Zimbabwe dollar and, with it, every ZSE-denominated holding. The exchange survived, switched to US dollars, and rebuilt.
Then came the reintroduction of the local currency, the RTGS dollar, then the Zimbabwe dollar proper, then the Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG) in April 2024. Each reintroduction brought the same sequence: initial stability, policy pressure, depreciation, and the eventual destruction of ZSE-denominated value. By the time ZiG was introduced, the parallel market rate had already reached US$1:ZW$40,000, against an official rate of US$1:ZW$30,000.
The ZSE's problem is not that it is badly run. It is that it is priced in a currency that Zimbabweans themselves do not trust. The Stockbrokers Association of Zimbabwe's president Arnold Chibvongodze put it plainly: investors remain reluctant to convert hard currency into ZiG to buy equities, largely due to uncertainty around exit mechanisms. If you cannot confidently get your money out, you will not put it in. That is not irrationality. That is arithmetic.
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The result has been a market that functions, technically, but does not serve its primary purpose. Raising fresh ZiG-denominated capital is near-impossible given the constrained money supply, Chibvongodze said, rendering the primary capital-raising function of a listing largely redundant. Delta Corporation's CEO Matts Valela captured it more bluntly some years ago: the country's capital base has been destroyed. If he went to all pension funds and said he wanted to raise US$15 million, he said, he would be lucky to get US$5 million. The money in the market is short-term in nature, and it is not growing.
The VFEX: Cure or Cannibal?
In 2020, the government offered what seemed like a solution. The Victoria Falls Stock Exchange, a subsidiary of the ZSE itself, would operate in US dollars, within the Victoria Falls Special Economic Zone, with a tax structure deliberately designed to attract companies and investors that the ZSE could no longer retain.
The incentives were formidable. VFEX-listed companies pay corporation tax at 15 per cent, compared to 24 per cent on the ZSE. Foreign investors pay a 5 per cent withholding tax on dividends, half the ZSE's 10 per cent rate. There is no capital gains tax on the disposal of VFEX securities, against a rate that at its peak was 40 per cent on the ZSE. Trading costs on the VFEX are 2.12 per cent, compared to 4.63 per cent on the ZSE. And crucially, dividends and capital proceeds can be repatriated freely in hard currency, without the foreign exchange controls that have long made the ZSE toxic for foreign portfolio investors.
Companies did not need to be persuaded twice. Every major company that migrated cited the same list of advantages. Innscor Africa, announcing its departure in February 2023, was explicit: USD reporting would reduce the group's perceived risk and help prospective financiers understand its financial performance. The ability to raise capital in hard currency, retain forex proceeds, and report in a universally understood denomination were not minor conveniences. They were the difference between being legible to international capital markets and being invisible to them.
But the RBZ's then-governor John Mangudya saw something else happening. The incremental export incentive scheme, which had allowed VFEX-listed companies to retain 100 per cent of export proceeds above their base threshold, was drawing companies not because of the equity market benefits but because of the forex retention advantage. He called it artificial migration. The worry was that companies were going to the VFEX for the wrong reasons, using a capital markets framework to access a currency management advantage. The RBZ subsequently reduced the VFEX forex retention from 100 per cent to 75 per cent.
The episode revealed something important: the VFEX was not a solution to Zimbabwe's capital markets problem. It was an escape hatch from it. And an escape hatch, once opened, draws a crowd.
The ETF That Could Not Track Itself
Perhaps no single story illustrates the ZSE's structural unravelling more precisely than the fate of the Old Mutual ZSE Top Ten Exchange Traded Fund. Launched in December 2020 with the straightforward mandate of tracking the ZSE's top ten counters, the ETF began its short life just as the great migration to the VFEX was beginning.
Within four years, 14 companies had delisted from the ZSE. Among those lost were five of the ETF's core constituents: Axia, Innscor, National Foods, Padenga, and Simbisa. The ETF found itself trying to track an index that kept losing its most important components. The tracking error became irreconcilable. Old Mutual wound up the fund in late 2024, citing the significant changes in ETF composition, heightened tracking error, and thin trading volumes.
It was a quiet but revealing moment. An index fund exists to give investors exposure to a market's best performers. When those performers leave the market, the fund loses its purpose. The OMTT ETF's demise was not a corporate failure. It was a market failure, embodied in a product that had nothing left to track.
What Econet's Exit Really Said
Econet Wireless Zimbabwe listed on the ZSE in September 1998. For 27 years it was the exchange's most energetic large-cap counter, driving liquidity on days when everything else was quiet. By December 2025, together with Delta Corporation, it accounted for over 70 per cent of the ZSE's total market capitalisation.
When Econet announced it was leaving, the board did not dress it up. The company's shares had traded for years at a significant discount to comparable African telecom operators, which typically trade at EV/EBITDA multiples of six to eight times. On the ZSE, Econet's ZiG-denominated share price could not reflect the intrinsic value of its towers, real estate, fibre infrastructure, and power assets, because those assets generate value in US dollars and the ZSE could only measure them in a currency nobody trusted. Safaricom's shares traded an equivalent of US$1.8 million daily. Econet's entire November 2025 traded value on the ZSE was approximately US$1 million. One month's trading in Nairobi, against one day's in Harare.
Ninety-five per cent of eligible Econet minority shareholders voted in favour of the delisting. That figure is not ambiguous. It is not a divided verdict. It is the judgment of the company's own shareholders, independently expressed, that the ZSE could no longer price their investment fairly.
What Econet did differently from the companies that preceded it was deliberate. Rather than directly converting its ZiG-denominated ZSE valuation into USD for a VFEX listing, the company took itself private first, had its assets independently revalued, and then listed only its infrastructure subsidiary, Econet InfraCo, on the VFEX at a valuation of US$1.078 billion. The two-step approach was an implicit indictment: direct currency conversion from ZiG to USD would have produced a figure too low to be credible. The company needed to step outside the ZSE's pricing entirely to get a fair number.
Analysts at Equity Axis estimated that Econet's departure alone could reduce daily ZSE trading volumes by 40 to 60 per cent and trigger a 30 to 45 per cent drop in the All-Share Index within weeks. What remained would be a market dominated by a single company, Delta, surrounded by thinly traded counters, many of them contemplating the same exit.
The VFEX's Own Reckoning
The story does not end with the ZSE haemorrhaging companies to the VFEX. Because the VFEX has its own delistings to account for.
National Foods migrated from the ZSE to the VFEX in 2022, drawn by the same advantages everyone else cited. Two years later, in January 2025, it left the VFEX as well. The reason: limited trading activity and cost-efficiency concerns. The VFEX, it turned out, had attracted companies but not liquidity. By Q1 2025, the VFEX's total traded value was US$58.5 million, with foreign participation of just 3.3 per cent. The foreign investors that the dollar-denominated bourse was supposed to attract had not arrived in meaningful numbers.
African Sun followed a similar trajectory, initiating steps to delist from the VFEX in early 2026, with shareholders voting to terminate the listing in March. The company offered to repurchase up to 40 per cent of its issued shares at US$5.17, a 35 per cent premium to its recent traded price, which was itself a signal that the market had consistently undervalued it even in the supposedly superior USD environment.
The VFEX's predicament exposes a fundamental tension in Zimbabwe's capital markets strategy. The exchange was designed to attract capital by offering tax advantages and dollar denomination. But tax advantages and dollar pricing are necessary conditions for market function, not sufficient ones. Liquidity requires a critical mass of buyers and sellers, institutional participation, and investor confidence that extends beyond which currency the settlement happens in. The VFEX grew its market capitalisation by 63.89 per cent in 2025, but its total value traded was US$111 million for the entire year. Safaricom, to return to that comparison, does that in roughly two months.
The Pension Funds Caught in the Middle
None of this is abstract for Zimbabwe's pension fund industry. Pension funds are required by the Insurance and Pensions Commission to hold a minimum 20 per cent of assets in prescribed assets, which includes ZSE-listed equities. As of September 2025, compliance across the pensions and insurance industry stood at just 10.31 per cent against the required 20 per cent.
This is not negligence. It is the consequence of the prescribed asset universe shrinking faster than pension funds can adapt. When a fund's mandated investments keep delisting, compliance becomes structurally impossible. The government has committed to strict enforcement of the 20 per cent threshold, but the companies that used to make compliance achievable are leaving. The pension fund manager who cannot meet their prescribed asset ratio is not making a rogue decision. They are navigating a market that policy has hollowed out.
The wider pension industry manages just over US$3 billion in total assets, with equities and property each representing around 36 per cent of portfolios. That concentration in ZSE equities was not unreasonable when the ZSE had depth. As depth contracts and the best counters migrate to an exchange where pension funds face additional regulatory complexity around USD-denominated holdings, the funds are being squeezed from both directions: mandated to hold local equities, while the local equity universe collapses around them.
What Remains, and What It Tells Us
As of April 2026, the ZSE has approximately 49 listed equities. Its total market capitalisation is roughly US$3.35 billion, of which Delta Corporation alone accounts for 31.83 per cent and Econet, now departed, was 21.05 per cent before its exit. Remove Econet and the effective concentration in a single counter is extraordinary by any standard. In the week to 21 April 2026, 88 per cent of ZSE daily trading value was accounted for by just five counters. The exchange is not diverse. It is a handful of companies with liquid enough shares to attract any trading at all, surrounded by dozens of names that trade in low double-digit deals on a good day.
The ZSE Holdings listing in July 2025, in which the exchange itself became a listed company on its own board, was a gesture of confidence that the market's constituents have not fully reciprocated. First Mutual Properties has indicated it is evaluating a potential delisting. The wave has not ended. The architecture of incentives that made the ZSE uncompetitive relative to the VFEX has not been dismantled. The structural tax disadvantages remain. The restrictions that caused daily trades to fall from a peak of 1,000 to around 80 have been partially addressed but not reversed.
What the ZSE has left, and what it may build on, is different from what it lost. The REITs that have listed: Tigere, Revitus, Eagle, and Pfuma: these represent a category of asset that local pension funds understand and need, denominated in ZiG, accessible to domestic institutional investors. ZSE Holdings itself is a novel instrument. A leaner exchange, focused on genuinely domestic instruments rather than trying to compete with the VFEX for internationally oriented blue chips, might have a coherent future. But that future requires the ZSE to stop pretending the competition with its own subsidiary is not happening.
The Question Nobody Is Asking
There is a version of this story that Zimbabwe's financial authorities prefer to tell. In that version, the VFEX is not cannibalising the ZSE but complementing it. Companies are not fleeing an inadequate market; they are choosing the right platform for their ambitions. The two exchanges serve different purposes and different investor bases. The capital markets are deepening, not contracting.
That narrative is not entirely false. But it is incomplete in ways that matter. The ZSE was founded in 1896. It survived colonial rule, UDI, independence, structural adjustment, hyperinflation, and the total destruction of the Zimbabwe dollar. It has opened every morning through all of it. What it has not previously faced is a domestic competitor, built by its own parent company, offering demonstrably better terms to every company and investor it serves. That is not complementary. That is a fundamental question about what the ZSE is for.
The answer that the delistings have provided is uncomfortable. The ZSE is increasingly for companies that cannot access the VFEX, for investors who cannot participate in a USD exchange, and for instruments that a dollar-denominated bourse does not serve. That is a smaller role than the ZSE has historically played. It may be an honest one. But it requires an honest conversation about currency policy, tax parity, foreign exchange controls, and what it actually means to have a functioning domestic capital market, that has not yet happened in any serious public forum.
The companies that left had the same conversation privately. They voted with their boards, and then with their shareholders. Ninety-five per cent of them said the same thing. The exchange is listening. The question is whether anyone in authority is.