Proactive Investors - Jeremy Hunt has dismissed claims that London’s stock market is in crisis and that reports of its demise are “massively overstated”.
Speaking at a summit organised by the Wall St Journal, the Chancellor said at least seven tech giants will be listed in London over the next decade.
Referencing the 'Magnificent Seven' group of US tech stocks (Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Meta, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Tesla), he said thier performance was the main difference in valuation between the LSE and New York.
“I predict that in a decade we’ll have seven UK tech stocks of our own, and that will pull up the London stock market exactly the same way that tech stocks are doing in the US at the moment.
“Why? Because we are Europe’s technology hub and we have that pipeline of great companies.
“I think London’s stock market demise is massively overstated. We do have challenges, and we’re addressing those challenges.”
Today saw results from construction giant CRH (LON:CRH), which shifted its primary listing to New York in September last year.
Last week bookmaker Flutter (LON:FLTRF) also said it is moving its listing to the US, while travel giant Tui, which reports next week, took its main listing back to Germany.
Hunt added that changes to listing rules proposed for London would reverse this trend.
“London needs to be competitive on two things. First of all, we need to make sure you can access that wall of money here, which is why we’re doing the big pension fund reforms.
“Secondly, what we need to do for tech in particular is to demonstrate that actually, you can go all the way from a startup to a successful IPO here in London.”