The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) hereby announces that it will be conducting a Special Foreign Exchange Auction on August 7, 2024. Depending on market conditions, additional foreign exchange auctions may be conducted over the coming weeks.

Interested banks are invited to submit their bids to the Foreign Exchange Monitoring and Reserve Management Directorate (FEMRMD) at the National Bank of Ethiopia between 10am and 12 noon on August 7, 2024. The submission of auction bids shall include: (1) the volume of US dollars being requested, and (2) the offer price, expressed as Birr per USD, at which a bank is willing to purchase the availed US dollars. Bids shall be sent to the following email (fxauction@nbe.gov.et) by a duly authorized bank official.

Successful banks will be sold US dollars at the bid price they have offered and no bank will be provided more than 20 percent of the total funds made available at the auction. Banks are required to settle their purchase on the same day as the auction date. The weighted average bid price of all successful bids will be announced by 3pm on August 7, 2024. 

NBE Concludes Special FX auction with a weighted average rate of Birr 107.9 per USD

The National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) hereby announces the results of the Special Foreign Exchange Auction held today August 7, 2024.  

The Special FX Auction saw the participation of 27 banks. The weighted average rate of all successful bids was Birr 107.9 per US Dollar. Per NBE’s daily practice of updating exchange rates based on FX market activity in the banking system, transactions conducted under today’s auction will be reflected in the Indicative Daily Exchange Rate posted tomorrow August 8, 2024.

NBE Governor Mamo Mihretu made the following statement following the announcement of the auction results: “We are pleased to see a substantial narrowing of the gap between bank exchange rates and parallel market rates over the past week, as well as meaningful progress towards exchange rate stability. This is precisely what our macroeconomic reforms intended to achieve—namely to ensure that most FX transaction activity can shift to the banking system, thereby helping both exporters bringing in foreign exchange as well as the many companies and entrepreneurs seeking foreign exchange.”

The Governor also welcomed the encouraging growth seen in the volume of FX transaction and noted: “We are also pleased to see a growing number of banks making foreign exchange available to their customers by approving past import requests and accepting new import requests; we anticipate and indeed expect more banks will follow this trend over the coming weeks and that they will do so with increasingly larger FX volumes.”