Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
One Uzbek state fund supplied 77% of London's first-half listing proceeds
London's register has fallen to 1,534 companies and more than 30 are leaving this year, while its seven first-half IPOs raised $780 million between them. LSE chief Julia Hoggett says the pipeline is the largest since 2005.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- The number of companies listed in London has fallen from 2,429 in 2015 to 1,534 in May 2026, a decade low, according to LSE data compiled by Statista.
- More than 30 companies have left or plan to leave this year, among them Schroders and easyJet, both of which have agreed to US takeovers.
- London's first-half listings were worth $780 million in total, while the US completed 72 IPOs in the same six months and raised $128 billion.
- Seven companies floated in London in the half, one of them the Uzbekistan National Investment Fund, the first international equity offering from Uzbekistan.
- The 2024 listing-rule rewrite scrapped shareholder votes on most acquisitions and gave founders more post-listing control, alongside lighter AIM rules and a new secondary market, Pisces.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Arrivals running at fourteen a year against thirty exits means the pipeline has to convert at several times the current rate before the listing count stops falling, and no reform in the package sets that rate.
- exposure Depressed London valuations put listed companies inside the reach of US corporates and private equity, and the size of name now reachable is a FTSE asset manager and a national airline.
- contradiction Hoggett offers more acquisitions as proof the rules are working, while acquisition is the mechanism removing names from the register, so the same activity reads as recovery from one end and attrition from the other.
- decision A founder weighing New York now has the exchange's own tally to argue with: thirteen of twenty-one UK companies that went there since 2014 no longer trade at all.
About $603 million of London's $780 million in first-half listing proceeds came from a single issuer, the Uzbekistan National Investment Fund [13][16]. That is 77% [1]. The other six floats raised roughly $177 million between them, an average of about $30 million each [2].
The per-deal gap is wider than the totals suggest. The 72 US IPOs averaged $1.78 billion of proceeds each, against $111 million for London's seven, about a sixteenth of the American figure [3][4][5]. EY says UK IPO proceeds more than tripled year on year in the first half [11]. Treat $780 million as the endpoint and the base a year earlier was under $260 million [9].
Then the flow. Seven floats in six months annualises to fourteen arrivals against at least 30 announced departures, better than two to one against [6]. The register has lost 895 companies since 2015, from 2,429 to 1,534 [8].
Hoggett's evidence that the reforms are working is behavioural. "There's been a rise in acquisitions since the shareholder-vote rules were scrapped, and smaller companies are already using AIM's revised rules," she said [7]. PwC puts total UK M&A value at 124.2 billion pounds in the first half, more than double a year earlier, on a lower number of deals [8]. Acquisitions are also how Schroders and easyJet stop being London companies [2]. Fortune attributes the buying interest to price, reporting that years of relative underperformance have depressed London valuations and made the companies attractive to foreign and private equity bidders [3]. Octopus Energy founder Greg Jackson has said the exchange needs more "hustle" to win IPOs back [4].
Hoggett's second argument sets the decline in a global frame. "The U.K. was the last major market to make that shift. I suspect that's why commentators have mistaken a global structural shift for a specifically British problem," she said [17]. The US averaged more than 300 IPOs a year between 1980 and 2000 and had 90 in 2025 [15]. She also disputes the destination: of the 21 UK companies that floated in the US since 2014, 13 have delisted, four trade up and the remaining four are down 71% on average, according to LSE data shared with Fortune [19]. That is 62% delisted [7]. London still recorded more than twice the equity offerings of the next most active European exchange in the first half [12].
"We have the largest pipeline for IPOs since 2005," Hoggett said [9]. Fourteen arrivals a year at $111 million each will not hold the count above 1,534, so the test is second-half and 2027 filings: enough of them to beat the exits, at sizes well past the $30 million the non-Uzbek six averaged [4][2][1].
What to watch
- Completion of the Schroders and easyJet takeovers, and whether the year's exit tally settles above 30.
- Second-half London filings, and whether any single deal clears the $603 million the Uzbekistan National Investment Fund raised.
- PwC's full-year UK M&A tally, and whether value keeps rising while the deal count falls.