Big Names Favor New York as London’s Floats Witness a One-Third Drop

Floats on the London Stock Exchange plummeted by a third in the first half of 2023.

Only eighteen firms went public during this period, compared to twenty-six in the same period last year.

This number is significantly lower than 2021, which saw forty-nine companies taking their stocks public. One of the few companies to list early in 2023 was Dar Global, a luxury property group from the Middle East, with a £480 million float in March.

Slump: Companies pulled floats and mergers in 2020 at the height of the pandemic

This decline follows a challenging start to the year when several major companies announced their intentions to abandon their listings on the London Stock Exchange in favor of the New York Stock Exchange. One such company was microchip manufacturer ARM, despite a campaign by government officials to persuade them to stay.

Within days, other companies followed suit and expressed interest in listing in the United States. Building materials group CRH eventually moved its shares to the New York Stock Exchange.

The London Stock Exchange suffered another blow earlier this month when WE Soda, the world’s largest producer of natural soda ash, retracted its plans for a £6 billion listing in London just two weeks after revealing them. The Turkish company attributed this decision to “extreme investor caution” in the UK.

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, many companies withdrew their plans for IPOs and mergers. While 2021 experienced a surge in listings as markets rebounded, there has been a significant lack of new entrants for the past eighteen months.