Analysis: Australian tech company IPOs accounted for 24%, or ~$1B, of the country's total IPO raises in 2020, the highest share in over a decade
Harry Brumpton / Bloomberg : Tweets: @bloombergasia Tweets: Bloomberg Asia / @bloombergasia : Tech companies are set to make up a bigger share of IPOs in Australia in 2021 as investor thirst for the sector appears unquenchable https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Australia's 24% tech share lands inside the global tech IPO wave of 2020, when worldwide tech listings were tracking their biggest year since 1999 and Ant Group alone was preparing a $30B+ dual listing. The local datapoint matters because it shows that wave reaching even a mid-sized market where tech had long been a marginal slice of new issuance.
Bloomberg's forward note — investor thirst 'unquenchable' into 2021 — proved to be the local peak: Australian startup funding topped out at AU$10.6B across 731 deals in 2021 before falling 30% in 2022, per later research on the 2022 pullback.
First-order effects
- ASX investors gained a materially larger tech allocation than in any year of the prior decade, with roughly $1B of the country's 2020 IPO raises going to tech companies.
Second-order effects
- Australia's listing surge competed for the same growth-stage companies as Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Chinese tech IPOs raised ~$16.3B in 2020 before declining in 2021 — regional exchanges were bidding for a finite pool of tech issuers.
Third-order effects
- The pattern that followed suggests public-market tech appetite leads the private cycle: the 2020-21 IPO window coincided with the 2021 funding peak ($6.5B), which had fallen to $3.4B by 2024, when 39% of Australian early-stage capital came from overseas — leaving the local pipeline dependent on foreign risk appetite.
The trend: National tech IPO shares are cyclical markers of a global risk-appetite wave, with public listings peaking just ahead of private funding peaks and declines.