Budapest, 11 November 2025 – “Nowadays, the Budapest Stock Exchange is considered a leading stock exchange in the region, and its robust performance increasingly supports economic development. The BUX index, which rose by 35 percent this year, also reflects this performance,” according to MNB Governor Mihály Varga, speaking at an event honouring the 10th anniversary of the publication “BÉT50 – Fifty Prosperous Hungarian Companies.” Governor Varga added that the Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE) provided companies an increasingly high-quality institutional framework for stock market entry, with households’ savings also playing an important role.
Governor Varga emphasised that the financial wealth of Hungarian households had reached a new peak in 2025 Q2, amounting to HUF 115 trillion. Within this, shares traded on the stock exchange accounted for 2.9%, over twice the figure of 1.2% observed in 2016. This clearly demonstrated that Hungarian savers were increasingly active on the capital market. He went on to point out that the BSE’s strong performance was thus partly due to the Hungarian corporate sector and partly due to capital market developments. Thanks to these two factors, the BSE was able to help growth-oriented enterprises with an increasingly wide range of tools. Varga recalled that over one-half of the companies featured in the publication were active in the central economic region, which indicated the potential for the other companies operating in this region as well as new startups in the future. He pointed out that to promote this, the Magyar Nemzeti Bank and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry had concluded a cooperation agreement in April 2025, the goal of which was to coordinate research on the corporate growth outlook while also strengthening the consideration of companies operating farther away from the capital. He called attention to the fact that the BSE functioned as a leading stock exchange in the region, with more than 150 securities available. This year’s results showed that the domestic capital market was still capable of operating as a vehicle for growth. Varga highlighted that the BÉT50 programme supported Hungarian small and medium-sized enterprises by reinforcing innovation and export capacity, providing an effective model in which enterprises and the stock market mutually strengthened each other.
Magyar Nemzeti Bank