This statistic illustrates the total value of initial offerings of new company stock (IPOs) on the London Stock Exchange, the United Kingdom, from 2013 to the third quarter of 2017. An Initial Public Offering (IPO) is the first time that a company's stock is sold to the public in the organized capital market. It can be seen that the value of IPOs listed on the London Stock Exchange decreased overall during the time period under observation, reaching a total value of 5.5 billion British pounds for the year 2016. This was a total of 10.2 billion British pounds less than two years previously, when the offering value of IPOs reached 15.7 billion British pounds.

Between 2017 and 2021, average duration of IPO transactions was the shortest in 2021, with nearly 23 days. On the other hand, with around 37.5 days, the longest average IPO duration was in 2020.

In all four quarters of 2021, tech IPO listings on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) raised the most money compared to the previous four years. In the second quarter of 2021, the total money raised from tech IPOs was over 2.5 billion British pounds and more than double the amount raised in the previous quarter.

Betweeen 2017 and 2021, the highest number of tech IPOs on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) took place in 2021, with a total of 28 listings. In the last three quarters of 2021, eight tech IPOs were listed in each quarter, a figure previously reached only during the second quarter of 2018.

In 2021, fully underwritten initial public offerings (IPOs) as a percentage of total deals in the United Kingdom was higher than in the previous year. Around 20.4 percent of IPO deals were fully underwritten in 2021. The highest share of fully underwritten IPOs out of total deals was in 2019, with 39.3 percent.

2021 was quite a year for initial public offers (IPOs) in the United States, which was largely influenced by the significant rise in the number of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) who went public. In 2021, there were 1,035 initial public offerings (IPOs) in the United States. In 2022 and 2023, however, the number of IPOs dropped to 181 and 154 respectively.

What does it mean to go public?

The management of a private company has a lot of control over its operation but raising funds from investors is more difficult. To access funds from regular investors, that is the general public, firms go public by offering stock shares at a certain price. As a result, these firms often have more capital to work with. An IPO can, and often does, raise billions of dollars for a firm. However, publicly traded companies also face increased regulation and disclosure requirements.

Staying private

Some firms delay going public for a longer time, in spite of their increasing value. If their valuation goes above one billion U.S. dollars, these firms are called unicorns and the highest valued unicorns are mostly based in the U.S. and China. Some firms, such as SpaceX, are still heavily investing in research and development projects, which shareholders often dislike due to low short-run dividends. At the moment, most unicorns are found in the technology sector, which is also the leading sector for IPOs in the United States. This indicates that investors consider this to be the industry most likely to see growth, and thus most worth investing in when companies go public.