Spanish companies increased their financing in the markets by 17% in the first half of the year, compared to the same period last year, despite the 82% drop in public sales offers (IPO), according to the annual report presented this Thursday by the Association of Financial Markets of Europe (AFME) about the performance of European markets during the first half of the year.
Specifically, the AFME study explains that this result in the Spanish case has been largely motivated by an annualized increase of 34% in the issuance of corporate bonds, up to 6,000 million euros. All in all, bond issuance remains below pre-pandemic levels, with volumes lower by 18% compared to 2019 and 22% compared to 2018.
For its part, the issuance of new shares also helped, since it grew by 12% thanks to the 70% increase in capital increases, which compensated for the fall in public sales offers (IPOs), and that is because These registered an “extremely low” level of activity in the first half of the year and decreased by the aforementioned 82% – in total, 23 million euros were accounted for in these operations.
In fact, AFME has shown that, if these levels are maintained during the second half of the year, IPOs will register the lowest annual volume in the last ten years in 2023.
Regarding high-yield bonds (high yieldin the jargon of the sector), emissions were reduced to nothing in the first half of the year – in the same period last year 1.1 billion euros were emitted – which represents a minimum level since 2009.