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The mood for public offerings and mergers and acquisitions is improving, according to an annual survey by Foley & Lardner LLP, an international business law firm.
This year 230 companies participated in the firm's Emerging Companies Survey and the responses, including those from the Gulf Coast, bode well for 2010.
Steve Vazquez, a partner in the firm's transactional and securities practice in the Tampa office, says local respondents and his own experience suggest that more companies are discussing public offerings and sales.
“There has definitely been a mood change,” Vazquez says. “Even if it hasn't translated into transactions yet. More companies are meeting with advisors. Last year, people were just trying to get through the quarter. What was causing it was a lot of fear of the unknown.... Now there's less fear and people are ready to put their risk capital to work.”
Much of that interest in the Tampa Bay area for business changes has come from IT and software companies, which Vazquez says usually benefit from having low capital needs.
Locally and nationally capital remains the big unknown and is driving the use of seller financing.
Vazquez says he was personally most surprised by the number of local respondents considering the public equity markets.
“A year or even two years ago, it was considered too expensive to be a public company and too risky,” he says. “There really haven't been any [Gulf Coast] companies that have gone public lately. I think we will see an increase in 2010. For a while people weren't happy with the expense of Sarbanes-Oxley, but now it is starting to be seen as just the cost of doing business. The public equity markets still represent relatively easy sources of capital.”
To read the entire national survey, download it here.
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