London exchange woos US start-ups

Going public? Go London.

That was the message today from Clara Furse, CEO of the London Stock Exchange, who visited Massachusetts to urge US start-ups to list on AIM, London’s junior international market.

Furse, speaking before the Mass Technology Leadership Council in Cambridge, said thousands of small companies are choosing to do initial public offerings on AIM, the LSE’s 12-year-old international market for small-cap companies, rather than US markets.

Furse said companies listed on AIM raised $30 billion in capital last year. She estimated that if AIM was its own exchange, it would rank as the world’s sixth-largest exchange for IPOs.

Furse portrayed AIM as a less costly and cumbersome alternative to the Nasdaq. She called it a ticket into London’s worldly trading market for companies that ‘‘need access to the kind of international investor community that we, and only we, have.’’

Several entrepreneurs in the audience said there was another big draw: They don’t want to deal with US regulatory requirements mandated by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

The number of companies listed on AIM has tripled since 2000, to 1,640, Furse said. Nearly 500 of them are international, with 63 companies worth $11 billion coming from the United States.

Describing one success story, Furse said the chief executive of Protonex Technology Corp., a Southborough maker of portable fuel supplies, chose AIM because ‘‘it costs $1 million to be traded in London, compared with $3 million on Nasdaq.’’

John Jacobs, Nasdaq’s executive vice president, said its listing fees are modest, but companies do incur costs in complying with federal regulations.

He said the Nasdaq is in the final stages of approval for Portal, a new trading market in which companies will be able to sell shares to sophisticated institutional investors without going through Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.
(Dow Jones/AP)