THE recent turbulence on world markets could bring to an end the rapid growth of the Alternative Investment Market, which has seen an ever higher number of companies joining each year since 2001.

However, market practitioners say that although a number of high-profile flotations have been delayed because of falling share prices, there is still a strong backlog of future market debutantes.

Figures seen by The Times suggest that the number of AIM floats has tailed off and is now running at a slower rate than last year. So far in 2006, with the first half almost complete, there have been an estimated 202 flotations, down from 277 in the same period in 2005.

This was itself a sharp increase on the 129 achieved in the first half of 2004. The trend for the current month was especially pronounced. There have been 30 market debuts this month, less than half the 61 recorded for June 2005.

“We are seeing a slowdown in the number of companies coming in this month compared with June 2005, which in itself was relatively unusual for being such a strong summer month,” a spokesman for the London Stock Exchange (LSE), which owns AIM, said. “But it is very hard to determine what impact the recent market volatility is having.”

Phil Adams, a managing director with Altium, the broker, which last week floated the building services company May Gurney, said that market conditions were depressing the prices being asked but that there was still a flow of companies seeking to come to the market and a flow of willing buyers. Mr Adams said: “I have spoken to a number of fund managers and they aren’t closing their books.”

AIM has been particularly successful in recent years at attracting foreign companies, having overtaken Nasdaq, the New York exchange, which traditionally had been the natural home for high-growth companies (see graph, above).

Statistics compiled by Canaccord Capital, the Canadian broker, show that Nasdaq dominated this market until 2000. Since then the position has swung around and AIM has overtaken the New York exchange both in the number of foreign companies quoted in London and in their market capitalisation.

Foreign debutantes have been put off New York by the heavier regulation imposed there by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other legislation after financial scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom.

Nasdaq owns a 25 per cent stake in the LSE and has had one takeover offer rebuffed. One of the attractions of the LSE to the Americans is the less heavily regulated AIM.

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