No longer the Nasdaq of the Pacific, the ASX wants next-gen startups to list at home
The local exchange once courted tech companies from Israel, Ireland and beyond. Now mired in a listing drought, it’s looking closer to home.
It was only a few years ago that the Australian Securities Exchange was casting its gaze overseas with a view of evolving a rudimentary bourse of local banks and diggers into something more cosmopolitan.
The ambition to become the ‘Nasdaq of the Pacific’, as one executive then envisioned, by wooing international tech companies to list in Australia delivered only limited results. Instead, a drought of new listings over the past two years is prompting a more back to basics approach for a shrinking ASX.
The ASX is now focused on convincing Australia’s next generation of tech startups to IPO at home after Atlassian jetted off for the real Nasdaq in 2015 – and with big names like Canva, Airwallex and ROKT all but confirming they will follow suit. The exchange is hoping the next wave, includes the likes of CultureAmp, SafetyCulture and Dovetail, don’t also fly the coop.
“There are a lot of unicorns and it would make sense for many of them to list locally because virtually all of them are below the S&P 500 threshold,” ASX’s general manager of listings, James Posnett, told Capital Brief.
