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Care for another parallel between the current year-end optimism and last year’s?
At this time in 2009, analysts were waxing optimistic that internet IPOs would boom this year, and a lot of the big names were thrown around as potential listings — Facebook, Zynga, Skype, LinkedIn.
But the market for public offerings essentially shut down for several months at the start of the year before a mild recovery in mid-year. Equity markets have obviously improved since then, but from that list of headliners above, only Skype has actually filed an S-1 and is now in the pipeline.
We therefore experienced a bit of déjà vu in reading this passage from Renaissance Capital’s 2010 global IPO market review:
In fact, the shadow pipeline remains significantly larger than the active backlog and includes a number of high-profile growth and private equity sponsored issuers. Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga are all rumored to be planning IPOs. While the timing of Facebook's debut is a heavily-contested subject, we believe at least one social networking IPO will file by year end. It is rumored that Facebook's China counterpart (Oak Pacific's renren.com) may be gearing up for an IPO, while there are dozens of social media companies that would be highly sought after by growth investors.
Then again, these companies have had no real urgency to file, and tech IPOs overall actually have had a decent year (helped along by a listings bump from China-based companies that is now driving Chinese startup valuations into bubblicious territory).
And with all the usual caveats about predicting the future and the remaining headwinds, the US recovery is further along now than it was last year. So it’s not really unreasonable to make the same call again.
We’ll close with these charts from the report showing both the pipelines and shadow backlog for next year:
Related links: Is Skype the one? – FT Alphaville Could Facebook save California – Bloomberg Primary concerns with secondary markets – FT Alphaville
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