Since January, over 100 listings have been documented in China and the US.
Prism Global, a financial infrastructure group based in Australia, is preparing for a £200m direct listing on the London Stock Exchange, providing a boost for the City’s troubled stock market. This marks just the second primary market listing on the LSE this year, with the float expected to take place in April and the company’s value predicted to be around £195m.
The LSE has recently experienced an exodus of firms moving to the New York Stock Exchange, with CRH, a building materials giant, and British technology firm Arm being among the latest to leave.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) head, Nikhil Rathi, announced earlier this week that the FCA will review London’s listing rules in an attempt to increase the market’s appeal.
Founded in 2018 in Australia, Prism Global constructs market infrastructure that enables investors to divide securities into distinct tradable financial products. The company relocated its headquarters to the UK and opened a London office in the previous year.
As part of its floatation, Prism will pursue a standard listing on the LSE’s primary market without raising any new capital. Recently, Dar Global, a Saudi Arabian real estate business, broke a prolonged spell by becoming the first firm this year to list on the LSE’s primary market. However, compared to its competitors, London is still significantly behind, with over 30 businesses listed in the US and 70 in China between January and March, according to EY data.
Alev Dover, Prism Global’s CEO and a former JP Morgan and Citigroup banker, remarked that the firm offers a new perspective for equity markets since it has created financial infrastructure to split the value of an underlying asset into its growth, dividend, and risk components.
London was our preferred choice for listing the company since we are a new firm and plan to introduce our products worldwide. We established a London office in 2022 to benefit from access to a vast and skilled pool of market participants and assist in the recruitment of market professionals as the company expands.
In other news, according to Refinitiv’s latest data, mergers and acquisitions that involved UK firms have declined to their lowest level in a decade. During the first quarter of 2023, M&A transactions with UK involvement amounted to only $47bn (£38bn), representing a 60% drop from the same period last year, and the lowest Q1 total since 2013.
Moreover, a prominent City fund manager recently cautioned that London has become a “backwater” in global stock markets. Nick Train, the co-founder of the £18bn investment firm Lindsell Train, stated that UK pension funds have preferred investing in promising global stocks instead of UK-listed businesses due to London’s “abysmal capital performance.”
