*UKHotViewsExtra* Does it really suck to list in London?

THG Chief Executive Matt Moulding was quoted in the Times on Saturday saying that he regretted floating the group in London and wished he had floated in New York instead. The comments were made in an interview given by Moulding to GQ.

The THG share price has been in freefall recently, not helped by a mid-October investor presentation led by Moulding, which raised concerns about business direction and the THG Ingenuity platform.

It's hard to see how the GQ interview can help the company's cause. Moulding is upset about the plummeting share price, blaming the London markets and short sellers in particular for the company's difficulties and hinting he may consider taking the company private again if share price does not recover. There are many company-specific issues at play at THG, which we won’t attempt to cover in this post. However, it is the assertion that London “has sucked from start to finish” and he “should have IPO’d in America” which gave us pause for thought. 

TechMarketView has long been a champion for London listings. We comment on listings in HotViews and track listing data in our quarterly Quoted Sector review (see here for Q3 2021 and work back through linked articles). So to explore if London really does “suck”, we compared the performance of THG from IPO to current share price against the same performance data for six other recent large tech listings (Auction Technology Group, Trustpilot, Deliveroo, Darktrace, Wise and Oxford Nanopore).

In all cases except Deliveroo, share price has increased from listing to the current date. Even Deliveroo, which had an IPO to forget in March, is down far less on its listing price than is THG.

TechMarketView subscribers, including those signed up to UKHotViewsPremium can read the full details in Does it really suck to list in London?. If you are not yet a subscriber, please contact Deb Seth to find out how to access this and much more.

Posted by Tania Wilson at '06:00' - Tagged: listing   markets