London Stock Exchange on track to lose THIRTY £100m-plus firms this year
The London Stock Exchange is set to lose as many as 30 £100m-plus firms from public markets this year, a figure bringing into sharp relief the troubles on London’s public equity markets.
Thirteen firms have announced a takeover this year and already completed the transaction.
And some seventeen more takeovers or delistings have been announced and are awaiting completion.
A host of small-caps under the £100m threshold have also either gone private, gone bust or announced plans to delist.
Whilst the exit door has been spinning, precious few big-ticket listings have come the other way: the flotation of CAB Payments, touted as a turning point, has left some investors badly burnt.
The dossier of firms, compiled by analysts at Peel Hunt, demonstrates the scale of the challenge facing London Stock Exchange bosses, City regulators and politicians to turn around the capital’s flagship bourse.
LSEG boss Julia Hoggett has promised to “fight” for every listing and a host of work is underway to create a regulatory framework more favourable to listings by ‘new’ economy firms.
“Our listing rules have worked very well for companies that have had fixed assets that have thrown off cash, where past performance is a good indicator of future performance,” she told CityAM earlier this autumn.
“They have not been as well built for intellectual property-based companies where the value is in the opportunity of the future.”
The largest take private announced and completed so far this year was that of tech firm Kape Tech, bought by Unikmind for an equity value of £1.2bn.
Other firms trading on the London Stock Exchange to have upped sticks already based on transactions this year include Fulham Shore, Numis and funeral firm Dignity.
Recent months have seen the announcement of the £4.5bn take private of Dechra and the £2.2bn offer for Network International by CVS and Francisco Partners. Neither of those have yet completed.
Last week saw another of the UK’s prmising biotech firms, Arix Bioscience, head for the exit.
Smaller firms below the threshold include names like Safestyle, Cenkos, and Asimilar.