London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Friday, Sep 19, 2025

Companies have raised more capital in 2020 than ever before

Companies have raised more capital in 2020 than ever before

In March the corporate world found itself staring into the abyss, recalls Susie Scher. From her perch overseeing global capital markets at Goldman Sachs, a bank, she witnessed firms scrambling for money to keep going as the wheels of commerce ground to a halt amid the pandemic.

Many investors panicked. Surely, the thinking went, public markets would freeze in the frigid fog of covid-19 uncertainty—and then stay frozen.

Instead, within weeks they began to thaw, then simmer, kindled by trillions of dollars in monetary and fiscal stimulus from governments desperate to avert an economic nuclear winter. In the past few months they have turned boiling hot.



According to Refinitiv, a data provider, this year the world’s non-financial firms have raised an eye-popping $3.6trn in capital from public investors (see chart 1). Issuance of both investment-grade and riskier junk bonds set records, of $2.4trn and $426bn, respectively. So did the $538bn in secondary stock sales by listed stalwarts, which leapt by 70% from last year, reversing a recent trend to buy back shares rather than issue new ones.

Initial public offerings (IPOs), too, are flirting with all-time highs, as startups hope to cash in on rich valuations lest stockmarkets lose their frothiness, and venture capitalists (VCs) patience with loss-making business models. VCs still plough three times as much into American startup stars than public investors do. But proceeds from listings are now growing faster than private funding rounds (see chart 2). The boom is global (see chart 3). On December 2nd JD Health, a Chinese online pharmacy, raked in $3.5bn in Hong Kong. A week later DoorDash, an American food-delivery darling, and Airbnb, a home-rental platform, both more or less matched it in New York.



In a world of near-zero interest rates, it appears, investors will bankroll just about anyone with a shot at outliving covid-19. Some of that money will go up in smoke, with or without the corona crisis. What does not get torched will bolster corporate haves, sharpening the contrast between them and the have-nots.

The original spark that lit capital markets on fire was the $6.25bn in debt and equity that Carnival Cruise Lines secured in April, remembers Carlos Hernandez of JPMorgan Chase, a bank.

Investors reasoned that cruises will one day sail again—by which time some of Carnival’s flimsier rivals will have sunk. Other dominant firms have benefited from this logic. Boeing, part of a planemaking duopoly, has sold $25bn in bonds this year, even as its bestselling 737 MAX jetliner has remained on the ground and the near-term future of travel up in the air.

Many Chinese companies have taken to issuing perpetual bonds, which are never redeemed but pay interest for ever, to repair their balance-sheets.



By the summer, notes Ms Scher, “rescue capital-raising” had given way to something less defensive. Investors’ ultraloose purse-strings allowed opportunistic firms to lock in historically low coupons. S&P Global, a ratings agency, calculates that the average investment-grade bond paid interest of 2.6% in this year’s covid recession, down from 2.8% in 2019.

Thanks to a boom in online shopping and cloud computing, Amazon, which is a leader in both areas, can now borrow at 1.5% for ten years, more cheaply than any American firm since at least 1980—and than some governments. Indebted giants like AT&T, a telecoms-and-entertainment group, are lengthening debt maturities. In November Saudi Aramco, an oil colossus, sold $2.3bn-worth of 50-year bonds, in spite of looming climate policies that may cripple its business of selling crude long before 2070.

Even cheap debt, of course, must be rolled over and, perpetuities aside, eventually paid back. With stockmarket valuations propped up by loose monetary policy, and only a slim prospect of tightening, many firms opted to shore up their balance-sheets with new share issues. Danaher, a high-rolling industrial conglomerate, raised over $1.5bn by selling new stock just after its share price returned to its pre-pandemic highs in May; it has risen by 39% since.

On December 8th Tesla, an electric-car maker whose market value has grown eight-fold this year, to $616bn, said it plans to issue $5bn-worth of shares.

With shareholder payouts trimmed or suspended until the covid fog lifts, the cash held by the world’s 3,000 most valuable listed non-financial firms has exploded to $7.6trn, from $5.7trn last year (see chart 4). Even if you exclude America’s abnormally cash-rich technology giants—Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook—corporate balance-sheets are brimming with liquidity.

It is still too early to tell what firms will do with all that cash. The merger market is showing signs of life, though mostly as deals put on ice during the pandemic are being revived. Many companies will content themselves with maintaining liquidity, at least until a covid-19 vaccine becomes more widely available.

Startups, for their part, will use IPO proceeds to blitzscale their way to profitability. The pandemic has made business models that might not have matured for years, such as digital health, suddenly viable.

Many will fail. But for now giddy investors are pouring money into any firm whose IPO prospectus features the words “digital”, “cloud” or “health”. Headier still, “special purpose acquisition companies”, which go public with nothing but a promise to merge with a sexy startup later on, and which have raised $70bn in 2020, mostly on Wall Street, are shattering previous records.

Markets seem no more discerning in mainland China, where proceeds from listings hit $63bn, the most since 2010. Hong Kong added another $46bn. Shanghai’s STAR Market, a year-old technology board, this week welcomed its 200th member, bringing its IPO haul to $44bn. In September demand for shares to be traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange by Nongfu Spring, a water-bottler, outstripped supply by 1,148 times.

Even the authorities’ last-minute suspension of Ant Group’s record-breaking $40bn IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai, after the fintech titan’s co-founder annoyed regulators, may not frighten other listers. And so long as geopolitical tensions between America and China persist, more Chinese firms with an American stock ticker may avail themselves of a Hong Kong one, observes Julien Begasse de Dhaem of Morgan Stanley, a bank.

For now, capital is likely to keep flowing. Mr Hernandez says his bank’s pipeline of IPOs looks “the most robust in years”. The ten-year Treasury yield is below 1% and the spreads between American government and corporate bonds have narrowed to pre-pandemic levels. As a result, even riskier firms’ paper yields less than 5%, according to JPMorgan Chase. Investors expecting meaningful returns are therefore eyeing stocks. For the pandemic’s corporate winners, the choice between cheap debt and cheap equity is a win-win.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Massive Strikes in France Pressure Macron and New PM on Austerity Proposals
Trump Seeks Supreme Court Permission to Remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook
Hillary Clinton’s Reckless Rhetoric Fuels Division After Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
NASDAQ Rises to Record as Intel Soars More Than 20%, Nvidia Gains 3%
Nvidia’s $5 Billion Bet on Intel Reshapes AI Hardware Landscape
Trump and Starmer Clash Over UK Recognition of Palestinian State Amid State Visit
Trump’s Quip on Biden and Google Lawsuit Revives Debate Over Antitrust Legacy
Macron and his wife to provide 'scientific photographic evidence' that she is a real woman
US Tech Giants Pledge Billions to UK AI Infrastructure Following Starmer's Call
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
DeepMind and OpenAI Achieve Gold at ‘Coding Olympics’ in AI Milestone
SEC Allows Public Companies to Block Investors from Class-Action Lawsuits
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Federal Reserve Cuts Rates by Quarter Point and Signals More to Come
Effective and Impressive Generation Z Protest: Images from the Riots in Nepal
European manufacturers against ban on polluting cars: "The industry may collapse"
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Trump: Cancel quarterly company reports and settle for reporting once every six months
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
US Launches New Pilot Program to Accelerate eVTOL Air Taxi Deployment
Christian Brueckner Released from German Prison after Serving Unrelated Sentence
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Hong Kong Industry Group Calls for HK$20 Billion Support Fund to Ease Property Market Stress
Joe Biden’s Post-Presidency Speaking Fees Face Weak Demand amid Corporate Reluctance
Charlie Kirk's murder will break the left's hateful cancel tactics
Kash Patel erupts at ‘buffoon’ Sen. Adam Schiff over Russiagate: ‘You are the biggest fraud’
Homeland Security says Emmy speech ‘fanning the flames of hatred’ after Einbinder’s ‘F— ICE’ remark
Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Assassin Tyler Robinson Faces Death Penalty as Charges Formally Announced
Actor, director, environmentalist Robert Redford dies at 89
The conservative right spreads westward: a huge achievement for 'Alternative for Germany' in local elections
JD Vance Says There Is “No Unity” with Those Who Celebrate Charlie Kirk’s Killing, and he is right!
Trump sues the 'New York Times' for an astronomical sum of 15 billion dollars
Florida Hospital Welcomes Its Largest-Ever Baby: Annan, Nearly Fourteen Pounds at Birth
U.S. and Britain Poised to Finalize Over $10 Billion in High-Tech, Nuclear and Defense Deals During Trump State Visit
China Finds Nvidia Violated Antitrust Laws in Mellanox Deal, Deepens Trade Tensions with US
US Air Force Begins Modifications on Qatar-Donated Jet Amid Plans to Use It as Air Force One
Pope Leo Warns of Societal Crisis Over Mega-CEO Pay, Citing Tesla’s Proposed Trillion-Dollar Package
Poland Green-Lights NATO Deployment in Response to Major Russian Drone Incursion
Elon Musk Retakes Lead as World’s Richest After Brief Ellison Surge
U.S. and China Agree on Framework to Shift TikTok to American Ownership
London Daily Podcast: London Massive Pro Democracy Rally, Musk Support, UK Economic Data and Premier League Results Mark Eventful Weekend
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Le Pen Tightens the Pressure on Macron as France Edges Toward Political Breakdown
Musk calls for new UK government at huge pro-democracy rally in London, but Britons have been brainwashed to obey instead of fighting for their human rights
Elon Musk responds to post calling for the murder of Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk: 'Either we fight back or they will kill us'
Czech Republic signs €1.34 billion contract for Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks with delivery from 2028
USA: Office Depot Employees Refused to Print Poster in Memory of Charlie Kirk – and Were Fired
Proposed U.S. Bill Would Allow Civil Suits Against Judges Who Release Repeat Violent Offenders
Penske Media Sues Google Over “AI Overviews,” Claiming It Uses Journalism Without Consent and Destroys Traffic
×