Business Insight Zone

You were expecting a blockbuster quarter, maybe?

Err, NO.

While our IPO Scorecard for Q3 isn’t quite as blank as the vintage Uno scorecard shown here, it certainly wasn’t pretty: a whopping total of five IPOs on U.S. markets for the quarter, for a cumulative value a bit south of $1 billion. You have to go back to the first half of 2003 to find numbers that low — and, so far, anyway, Q4 doesn’t look like an improvement.

A few other tidbits:

• In each of the preceding four years, there were at least 100 total IPOs through the first nine months of the year. The total through the first nine months of this year: 30.
• About $24 billion has been raised in IPOs this year . . . but Visa’s blockbuster IPO from March accounts for nearly 3/4 of that total ($17.9 billion).
• Pity poor Rackspace: perfectly nice little company, good reputation in the Internet-hosting business, revenues growing year after year, consistently profitable . . . and it’s lost ground from the day it debuted on August 8. As I write this, it’s trading at $6.18, against a first-day opening price of $10.00. You try so hard to keep your nose clean, and what does it get you?

By all means, check out our IPO Scorecard for more details — especially if you’re a fan of horror-shows.

In 2003, when things were about this bleak on the IPO front, it took most of a year for normal traffic to resume. But back then we weren’t facing market conditions consistently called the worst since the Great Depression.

My advice: don’t hold your breath for your favorite private company to go public.

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Related posts:

• The global IPO market, such as it is.
• Waiting for IPO.
• Weakness prevails in the IPO market.
• Rackspace’s IPO — what it tells us about the IPO market.

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(Photo by SanFranAnnie.)

Category: IPOs