Firmus $5 billion float failure deals blow to Australia's shrinking share market

By Christine Chen

SYDNEY, Oct 9 (Reuters) - The collapse of Nvidia-backed data centre operator Firmus' $5 billion IPO is a blow to Australia's capital markets which are already facing a shrinking pool of listed entities, investors said.

Australia's benchmark share index is heavily skewed to the Big Four banks and huge mining companies, so some money managers had hoped a big tech listing would make the market more attractive by offering more choice to investors.

Firmus pulled its listing plans on Friday, citing market volatility and conditions, and said it would pursue a private fundraising round instead.

At $5 billion, the closely-watched IPO would have ranked as the fourth-largest public offering globally so far this year, behind SpaceX, CXMT Corp and Cerebras Systems, according to Dealogic data.

It would also be the second-largest IPO for the Australian Securities Exchange on record, behind only Telstra Corp's $10 billion flotation in 1997.

The withdrawal is a setback for the ASX, which has been grappling with a declining number of listed companies after several major privatisations in recent years and a weak pipeline of new listings, investors said.

"It's really bad," said Oscar Oberg, lead portfolio manager at Wilson Asset Management, referencing the capital market implications of the deal's collapse. WAM has been a Firmus investor since last year.

"We owned shares early, I'm not going to hide behind that. But I just think it would have been good for the market to have something new."

"The lack of IPOs has been very frustrating for a long, long time for us … that to me is the most disappointing part."

There were just $1.37 billion worth of new share sales in Australia in the first nine months of 2026, according to LSEG data, the most since 2021, but well below global rival exchanges.

Hong Kong, for example, has seen 118 companies, mainly those from the technology sector, raising around $50 billion via IPOs in that period, according to the data from the Hong Kong stock exchange.

The ASX has also steadily lost listed companies, particularly in the infrastructure sector, to takeovers by private enterprises, said Jamie Hannah, deputy head of Investments and Capital Markets at VanEck Australia.

In September 2026, there were 1,891 companies listed on the ASX, down from 2,066 in 2016, according to the market operator.

"It's a blow to the market, not getting off one of these big listings," Hannah said. "We do want to see bigger transactions take place on the market. And I think most Australians who invest would like to see more opportunities as well."

Hannah said that while Firmus' IPO failure was largely to do with the nature of the company, it was also a blow for the market's diversity, which is heavily concentrated between the so-called Big Four banks and major miners like BHP and Rio Tinto.

In what would further bolster miners' concentration, London-listed miner Glencore expects to begin trading on the ASX on October 14, and its CEO said on Friday the company had seen "very strong" interest from potential investors.

"We're very overweight in the materials resource sector and obviously in financials. They're the backbone of the Australian market and it also creates cyclical performance based on individual overweights in each of those sectors," Hannah said.

(Reporting by Christine Chen in Sydney; Editing by Scott Murdoch and Kim Coghill)