Follow-ons Find a Following

At the end of 2006, Clarkson identified 169 public shipowning companies with a combined market capitalization of $207 billion and a fleet of 7,288 ships. While this might be considered over-inclusive, the reality is that 22 of those were merchant shipping companies that went public in 2005 while another 17 went public during 2006. The combination of the growing number of existing public shipping companies and the growth in annual IPOs has led us to distinguish the awards given out for the act of going public initially from what companies use their publicly-listed status to accomplish in the equity markets once they arrive.

To do this we have introduced a new award for the best followon offering of the year. We have used the term follow-on offering as a catchall to include any offering of shares after a company’s initial public offering. This includes the sale of new shares to the public to raise funds as well as secondary offerings, where a selling shareholder registers to sell a large block of its securities. Private placements where new shares in an existing public company are placed in a private offering to institutional investors then subsequently listed on the appropriate exchange would also qualify for these purposes as follow-on offerings.

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