After last year's surge of IPOs in the Asia-Pacific region, US IPO issuance has taken the top perch so far in 2011. The reasons for this are several, but chief among them are the increasing quality and growth potential of US IPOs relative to Asia-Pacific offerings and the broad underperformance of Asia's equity markets. US IPO momentum is also building with a pipeline of high-profile deals. While the year is just beginning, and trends can shift quickly, here are some of our high-level insights into recent IPO market trends.
So far this year there have been 24 US IPOs, an 85% increase from the 13 seen in the first month and a half last year. These IPOs raised $8.1 billion, up materially from $1.9 billion last year, in part due to multi-billion offerings from Nielsen Holdings (NLSN) and Kinder Morgan (KMI). After strong IPO issuance in November and December, the IPO market seems to be sustaining the momentum seen at the end of 2010. These are signs that the IPO market is back to normal levels of issuance that is expected in a growing economy.
The IPO pipeline currently contains many high-profile names, such as HCA Holdings Inc, Toys "R" Us, LinkedIn, Skype, Freescale Semiconductor and Pandora. Renaissance Capital will issue research on each of these coming IPOs prior to their pricing, and expects to publish its initial view on HCA, including preliminary estimates and an analysis of HCA's proposed valuation, later this week. In addition, Renaissance Capital recently released an in-depth look at recent IPO trends and the current IPO pipeline. For more information on our institutional research product, please visit www.renaissancecapital.com/research/.
