Daily Management Review

SPAC IPOs volume in the US surpasses all 2020 results in two and a half months


03/18/2021


Since the start of this year, SPAC IPOs in the US have totalled $85.9bn - more than the full year 2020 in less than three months. This is data from SPAC Research, a resource that tracks such deals.



Rob Young via flickr
Rob Young via flickr
Such results are all the more telling because last year was also a record year in terms of the amount raised in this way, with such deals totalling $83.4bn, more than six times the results for 2019. The number of SPAC IPOs has also already surpassed last year's results, with 264 versus 248.

A SPAC IPO is not an IPO in the literal sense - in this case, a company that wants to go public merges with a so-called special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). It is essentially a shell company that has been set up in advance by investors for the purpose of such a merger, it conducts an IPO on some stock exchange and then looks for a company to merge with.

This method of going public has recently grown in popularity, as has another alternative to a traditional IPO, that is, a direct public offering. Both options enable private companies to bypass the long and costly IPO process. By comparison, a conventional IPO in the US has raised $29.5bn since the beginning of the year.

source: spacresearch.com