IPO Watch EMEA 2024
Positive equity market performance, lower volatility, falling interest rates and inflation returning to central banks’ targets has laid the foundation for a strong IPO environment in 2025.
Taking your company from private to public is a huge step and a transformational change. It’s best to do it in partnership with experts who’ve been through the process many times before, and who can rally the right people and skills you’ll need for the journey. At PwC, we have a dedicated IPO team to help you:
- weigh up the pros and cons of an IPO
- assess how ready you are for a listing and how to maintain optionality in relation to your chosen exchange(s)
- navigate every phase of the complex IPO process
- prepare your business for life as a public company.
The team works on IPO readiness assessments, IPO assurance services, project management, structuring advice, and post-IPO. We do this for UK and international companies. And we’ll bring in experts from the wider PwC network to support with, for example, tax advice, strategy, reward planning, management incentives, corporate governance and compliance.
Services
Before going public, you need to be confident it’s the best way to fund the next stage in your organisation’s development. We’ll help you assess that, and guide you through the strategic decisions you’ll need to make. For example, you need to think whether you’re ready to accept the extra disciplines that come with being public. And if you do go public, which market will provide the best valuation and access to capital at the right time.
Getting ready for an IPO
Our IPO readiness assessment focuses on what’s important to public market investors and other stakeholders, so that management has a clear roadmap to deliver a successful transaction and operate as a listed business. We’ll help you identify IPO readiness gaps, create a timeline to remediate them, and form some of the habits of a successful public company.
Whether it’s for an IPO sprint, or a full IPO readiness assessment, together we’ll appropriately scope our review and use our proprietary readiness tool to benchmark your organisation against all the key attributes of a successful public listing. This includes reviewing your strategy and equity story, corporate governance structure, broader ESG agenda, and financial and management reporting processes. We’ll point out the “no regrets” actions you can take, and keep your options open for the potential listing market and exit route.
Our global team is experienced in IPOs around the world, and we’ll carefully consider company-specific and external factors to help you determine which markets and listing venues are right for you. We also understand that maintaining optionality of exit scenario or listing venue is key at the early stage of any IPO journey. So we can help you prioritise any required actions in a way that best impacts your business and keeps all potential options open.
Making the process run smoothly
Executing an IPO involves carefully orchestrating different teams including marketing, legal, accounting and tax. They all need to work together to get the transaction done, while making sure business as usual runs smoothly. We’ll help you with all this, so that your transaction diligence is done properly and you can submit all the required documentation to the regulator and your investors.
We’ll act as your IPO accountants: providing assurance on your financial track record, performing the required due diligence, and giving you practical advice throughout. We’re also there as a sounding board when your banks and other advisors come to you with recommendations on valuation, investor targeting and pricing.
Adjusting to life as a public company
Once your company is listed, it will be under greater public and regulatory scrutiny than ever before, with many more stakeholders to manage. You’ll also need to keep a close eye on risks to protect your company’s reputation, safeguard your credibility and keep your investors feeling confident. We’ll help you do that, and make sure you have all the right processes and procedures in place to fulfil your obligations as a public company.
We can also continue to support you with financial reporting, corporate governance, risk management, and any future transactions you might consider.
Insights
7 results
Global IPO Watch 2024
Increasingly positive backdrop for equity issuance with IPO volumes continuing to normalise. Increased macroeconomic stability, a continued flow of resilient economic data and base rate cuts in major western economies have resulted in strong performance for equity markets in 2024, particularly in the US. The MSCI World index ended November up 18% year to date.
Global Top 100 Unicorns
This publication analyses global Unicorns, including the Top 100 Unicorns, and highlights the changes in the composition of the list, comparing the data as at September 2024 and September 2023.
Global IPO Watch H1 2024
IPO activity on western exchanges picked up in H1 2024 as the macroeconomic backdrop continued to stabilise. Investor sentiment to equities generally, and IPOs specifically, continued to improve with encouraging aftermarket performance of the 2023 and H1 IPO cohorts.
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