The London IPO market outlook has rarely looked bleaker in modern times. Fundraising in the first half of 2025 fell to at least a three-decade low, with just five debuts raising a combined £160 million ($218.6 million), according to CNBC, citing Dealogic data.
By the close of the first quarter of 2025, UK IPO proceeds had dropped to £100 million, down from £300 million in the same period a year earlier, according to PwC’s IPO Watch report cited by CNBC. The full year saw just seven new listings raise a combined £557m, ending the brief surge seen at the back end of 2024 that had brought names such as Shawbrook and Princes Group to market.
A Decade-Low in Fundraising
The drought has coincided with a wave of departures. Gambling group Flutter completed the cancellation of its London Stock Exchange listing on 3 August 2026, according to Flutter’s corporate investor relations page, with the company’s ordinary shares now solely traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Flutter had announced its intention to walk away from London in June.
The exits extend beyond Flutter. CNBC reported in July 2025 that British fintech group Wise had announced a move of its primary listing from London to New York, and that AstraZeneca, the most valuable company on the FTSE 100, was reportedly considering a similar switch to the United States.
Against that backdrop, takeover activity has hollowed out the existing index. Stalwarts including Schroders and Tate & Lyle have been acquired by private buyers taking advantage of the UK’s valuation gap, further thinning the market’s depth.
Investment bank Peel Hunt attributed the market’s lopsided character to volatility and geopolitical disruption, including conflict in the Middle East and global technology sell-offs, pushing potential issuers to delay going public. ‘IPO timetables had been pushed back to post summer for some time now, so the recent lack of activity is not a surprise,’ Peel Hunt said in a note. ‘The big question…waiting to be answered was how many of these deals were going to come post summer or alternatively be pushed back into 2027.’
London IPO Market Outlook Hinges on Burnham
Entering the second half of the year, companies weighing a flotation are watching new prime minister Andy Burnham. His team, including City minister Lucy Rigby and chancellor John Healey, has yet to announce substantive new policy for the equity capital markets.
Peel Hunt said the uncertainty surrounding Burnham’s market policy ‘has led many potential issuers to re-evaluate their timetables’, pushing a cohort that had been considering a 2026 window to revisit 2027 instead. The bank said there remains ‘a number of high quality’ companies in the UK pipeline, though that optimism is not widely shared given the scarcity of blockbuster flotations in recent years.
The last large-cap listing of that scale was Deliveroo, which floated for £7.9bn in 2021 before being sold to US rival DoorDash four years later. The largest listing of the current year was the Uzbekistan sovereign wealth fund UzNIF, which raised £1.4bn in May.
A late-2025 rally did briefly shift the picture. Full-year 2025 data from EY showed 23 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange across the full year, raising £2.1 billion, a 170% increase in proceeds year-on-year, with 11 of those IPOs arriving in the fourth quarter alone and contributing £1.9 billion. PwC UK’s IPO Watch EMEA 2025 review put the comparable figure at £1.9 billion from 11 IPOs using a different methodology that excludes AIM listings and applies a minimum $5 million raise threshold. Both reports described it as London’s strongest year for IPO activity since 2021.
That fourth-quarter bounce has not carried into 2026, and analysts say the pipeline question now centres on whether companies waiting for calmer conditions will hold for a post-summer window or defer entirely until next year. With key policy signals from Burnham’s government still absent, that answer may not come before autumn.
