The JSE’s announcement earlier this month that it would terminate the listing of Nutritional Holdings’ securities is not, on the face of it, that significant. The company appeared to be in a world of distress and no serious investor would be sorry to see it go.
On the flip side, there have been just six new listings so far in 2022, of which four were on the JSE, with one more to come as Zeda scrapes in just before Christmas. What is most telling is not that there are a lot of delistings, as delistings are a natural part of the public market life cycle, but rather the almost complete dearth of new arrivals raising primary capital when listing, outside the temporary blip of capital raisings by Real Estate Investment Trusts in the mid-2010s.What listings there have been were mostly technical by nature — unbundlings, demergers and secondary listings by introduction, for example.