Business Insight Zone

We’ve issued our IPO Scorecard for the second quarter — and the news ain’t pretty. A fourth as many IPOs as the same period last year, less than $5 billion in pricings altogether, blood raining from the sky no good pipeline of big IPOs forthcoming, etc. Check out the whole gory scene for yourself:

IPO Scorecard press release

IPO Scorecard pages at Hoover’s

Thanks to our work on this, today I got to spend a chunk of time talking to different reporters about the IPO market. Largely, this meant giving my perspective on how the overall economy continues to depress IPOs, so that the companies coming to market tend to be smaller niche players with some sort of business track record, rather than the trendy “story” stocks of earlier years.

“Not this year”

All of the reporters wanted to know when I thought we might see a turn in the IPO market. I couldn’t be optimistic: the more I look, the less I think a turnaround is going to happen in 2008.

There are some signs of life in IPO-land, although you have to squint pretty hard to see them. For example, I offered a favorable view of GT Solar for Steve Gelsi at MarketWatch:

GT Solar’s IPO weighs in at $500 million

Now, $500 million sounds like a lot of money, but for an IPO it’s nothing special — certainly not one of the “Netscape-class” blockbusters that have moved the IPO market over the past dozen-plus years. We had one of those companies — Visa — launch on the public markets earlier this year, and in fact that IPO, which came to around $18 billion, continues to make the year-to-date numbers look better than they should.

No end in sight

My summary take: it’s going to be a lean year for IPOs, period, because there are just too many currents flowing the wrong direction in the financial world. Among them: the ongoing hangover from the credit crunch, the high price of oil, and even the fact that the U.S. is electing a new president this year — which implies that economic policies will shift, to a greater or lesser degree, next year.

I’ll be talking more about this as events warrant, plus update this entry with any other relevant stories from the reporters I talked to today. Meanwhile, tell me what you think:

Where are the financial markets headed for the rest of 2008?

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[SECOND] UPDATE, Thursday afternoon 22 July: Here are two four more stories incorporating IPO Scorecard information:

• Financial Week: Race for the White House, credit crunch put the kibosh on IPOs
• Inc.com: The Economy This Week
• BusinessWeek.com: IPOs: Still in a Deep Freeze
• New York Times DealBook: When Will the I.P.O. Drought End?

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Related posts:

• IPO prospects for 2008.
• Visa’s IPO: Into every howling stormfront of financial doom a ray of the purest sunshine must fall.
• The IPO market: a short historical recap.

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(The picture, by danperry.com, shows a scorecard for the Torrey Pines South course, site of the 2008 U.S. Open — which, when you think about it, has very little to do with the IPO market. But hey, it’s a scorecard, anyway.)

Category: IPOs