SGX set to receive more IPOs as momentum continues

SINGAPORE - The Singapore Exchange (SGX) looks set to receive more listings as momentum from 2025’s performance – the strongest in six years – continues in 2026.

Analysts say the bourse could see as many as 20 initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2026, including more listings from South-east Asia, and note that diversity and quality among issuers will be key to building a healthy stock market.

“2025 has been a year of transition. There should be more progress and improvement as we head into the next year,” said Mr David Cameron Smail, head of South-east Asia equity capital markets at JP Morgan.

This comes after market conditions improved markedly in 2025, underpinned by liquidity-boosting measures from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and easing inflation that lifted investor sentiment.

The Equity Market Development Programme, launched in February, was a key catalyst, with reforms focused on small- and mid-cap stocks and a shift towards a disclosure-based regime helping to set off a virtuous circle of stronger performance, rising investor interest and higher trading volumes.

The Straits Times Index bounced back from a sharp drop in April to set new record highs throughout the year. It broke the 4,000-point mark on July 2 and crossed the 4,600-point mark on Dec 22.

The reforms also led to a stronger appetite for listings on SGX. The exchange saw a flurry of IPOs across both the mainboard and Catalist in 2025, with local software-as-a-service firm Info-Tech Systems ending a more than two-year drought in mainboard listings when it debuted in July.

Lower interest rates in 2025 also supported the year’s largest IPOs, including two real estate investment trust (Reit) listings – NTT DC Reit, which raised US$773 million (S$993 million), and Centurion Accommodation Reit, which raised $771.1 million.

SGX closed the year with 16 listings. Six were on the Catalist, including Skylink Holdings via a reverse takeover, and seven on the mainboard, which included two secondary listings. Total deal value for 2025 reached about US$2.5 billion, the highest since 2019, when new listings raised US$2.26 billion.

“Compared with 2019, we observed that in 2025, fund managers were more willing to meet the issuers and listen to their stories. There is a lot more interest, and the market is warming up to the results of the Government’s review,” said Mr Ong Hwee Li, chief executive of SAC Capital.

The Catalist board also attracted higher-quality listings and larger fund-raisings than in previous years, said Ms Tay Hwee Ling, capital markets services leader at Deloitte South-east Asia.

ASEAN in the spotlight

Amid ongoing geopolitical uncertainty sparked by US President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, South-east Asia has emerged as an increasingly attractive investment region.

Regional companies are expected to make up 20 per cent to 30 per cent of SGX’s IPO pipeline and add greater diversity to the bourse, analysts say.

Mr Thilan Wickramasinghe, head of research and regional financials at Maybank, said Singapore should deepen ties with neighbouring markets and strengthen its position as the ASEAN financial centre, offering unicorns the global credibility and connectivity that other South-east Asian markets may not be able to provide.

As it stands, SGX has a lopsided composition, with financials and property stocks accounting for around 70 per cent of the market. A greater diversity of IPOs by firms from across the region would therefore be key to deepening liquidity and attracting more investors.

The upcoming Nasdaq-SGX dual-listing bridge,

announced by MAS and SGX on Nov 20

, will also offer a unique proposition to South-east Asian companies.

The arrangement, a first of its kind and expected to be finalised in 2026, will allow companies to list in both the US and Singapore with a single set of documents, significantly reducing regulatory friction and administrative costs. For now, it is targeted at companies with a market capitalisation of $2 billion and above.

Mr Chan Yew Kiang, ASEAN and Singapore IPO leader at EY, said that the dual-listing bridge would likely cater to the needs of regional players more than Singapore companies, as there are not many companies headquartered in Singapore that meet the market capitalisation requirements.

“I believe SGX is hoping for the ASEAN play. There is a familiarity here, and you can still have the business owners’ or investors’ desire to list in the US.

“Having one set of prospectuses for both listings would fit both exchanges very well. We get the big companies to list here and Singapore gets to raise its profile as a result,” he added.

The dual-listing bridge could also serve as a “branding exercise” to help SGX attract companies that might otherwise have chosen to list elsewhere.

Bringing more diversity to the SGX

While Reits and consumer and industrial firms are expected to make up the bulk of new listings in 2026, analysts also foresee a growing number of IPOs from “new economy” sectors such as technology, fintech, biotech and healthcare. Other potential growth areas include financial and wealth management, industrial services and data centres.

Building clusters of such companies on SGX will be crucial to developing depth in these sectors and expanding diversity on the bourse.

OCBC head of investment research Carmen Lee said that Singapore could also focus on further developing “sub-sectors” within established sectors to increase diversity, such as hospital and data centre Reits within the Reit space. 

The market would also need to develop “peripheral industry players” so that it is not reliant on single industry heavyweights, she said. “Firms will naturally gravitate towards a country that already has a sizeable cluster of listed companies, and this gives investors more choice.”

Mr Pol de Win, SGX head of global sales and origination, said diversity of companies on the bourse is important for Singapore and the region. “We want to be seen as a marketplace with a variety of business models that allows companies to continue to grow and tap the public markets for growth, and give their early shareholders the ability to cash out so that capital can be recirculated.

“If we want to continue to be relevant, especially as a more regional platform, we have to be able to cater to these types of businesses.”

In August,

SGX said it has more than 30 companies in its IPO pipeline

that have already hired advisers and started preparatory listing work.

Mr de Win said this figure is likely to translate to actual IPO launches in 2026.

“Since August, we have seen deals happen and more supply coming in. We continue to see upward momentum, and looking at the number of IPOs that have launched in the second half of 2025, on an annualised basis it matches up quite nicely with the pipeline that we had announced.”

Keeping up performance post-listing

Post-listing performance in 2025 has been mixed, with only a handful of new listings trading above their IPO prices, including Lum Chang Creations, up 104 per cent; Centurion Accommodation Reit, up 26.1 per cent; and MetaOptics, up 490 per cent.

How these stocks perform going forward will be closely watched as a key test of SGX’s market revitalisation.

Mr Jason Saw, group head of investment banking at CGS International, which was the sole bookrunner for Lum Chang Creations’ IPO, said the interior fit-out company operated on a unique model, despite being primarily a domestic-based business, and exemplified the type of asset-light growth companies that SGX would need more of.

In contrast, NTT DC Reit, which fell 1.5 per cent, and UltraGreen.ai, down 2.8 per cent, have struggled to gain further traction after the initial hype surrounding their large deal sizes.

Analysts cited the relatively high prices of these IPOs as one reason for their lacklustre post-listing performance, and noted the pricing of future IPOs would need to be fair and reasonable in order to sustain investor interest.

In addition to delivering on their goals and promises, companies would also need to continue engaging stakeholders and investors after listing, which is still not common practice here.

“Many small- and mid-cap firms still do not understand the importance of disclosure. You need to communicate regularly with the market on topics such as dividend policy and rights issues. But I think many companies don’t do this well, and they also do not hold their own non-deal roadshows,” said SAC’s Mr Ong.

Mr Kenneth Tang, senior portfolio manager at Amova Asset Management, which was a cornerstone investor in several 2025 IPOs, added: “An IPO is always a journey, not the destination. Sometimes companies can be a bit lost after they meet their valuation goals and are already trading at the right multiples, so we need to always have a longer-term vision and communicate that vision well.

“We always advise companies that this is a journey of investors valuing under-appreciated change, and ultimately they should strive to get stronger and more sustainable returns. When they get into that position, their company’s stock price would then reflect those fundamentals.”

Analysts also hope to see improvements in research coverage, which is set to receive a boost from a research development grant under MAS’ Grant for Equity Market Singapore scheme, although some caution that a manpower shortage could limit coverage as IPO activity accelerates further in 2026.

But Mr de Win said this would not become a major hurdle in SGX’s aims to revitalise the market. “The ecosystem needs to continue to invest in people that can execute well and deliver services, but I don’t think it’s a massive bottleneck today. I believe our ecosystem can deal with it because service providers will naturally scale up and reallocate resources very quickly once they see the opportunities.”

Ultimately, the success of Singapore’s IPO market will hinge on how all the players in the ecosystem – companies, institutional and retail investors, brokers, research analysts and regulators – work together following a year of market reform. So far, the outlook is positive.

“Animal spirits have awakened already, and as long as we let them run and regulation keeps a light touch, I think markets will be able to do their thing,” said Maybank’s Mr Wickramasinghe. “Regulators need to be focused more on the macro structure of the market, like better governance and disclosure, as well as penalties.”

JP Morgan’s Mr Cameron Smail cautioned: “We need the first batch of IPOs to be a success. If we trip and fall, it will be hard for us to get up again. It’s all hands on deck, everybody working together, and then we can get the boat moving in the right direction and ideally it will be autopilot thereafter.”

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IPO battle between Singapore and US heats up

Before it saw a rebound in initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2025, Singapore had been steadily losing companies with listing ambitions to overseas exchanges, with 13 finding their way to the US. Most of these companies performed poorly post-listing, however, trading below their initial listing prices.

The weak post-listing performance by companies that have listed in the US, alongside improving valuations in Singapore, could give smaller firms with similar ambitions pause.

One of the worst performing local companies that listed in the US in 2025 is Singapore-based maritime digital technologies firm IOThree, which saw its shares plummet more than 90 per cent from its IPO price of US$4 to just 39 US cents within three weeks of its Nasdaq listing in April.

Another example is Singapore-based swim school Fitness Champs, which initially saw its share price jump 80 per cent from its IPO price of US$4 to US$7.20, two weeks after listing in September on Nasdaq. It subsequently fell more than 85 per cent to just US$1.07 four days later, and has been trading flat below US$1 since.

Analysts point to the small size and obscurity of Singapore firms in the US market as huge challenges to sustaining their post-listing performance.

Seeking higher valuations than what they would probably get in Singapore, these companies opted to list in the US due to the higher liquidity and trading volumes there, as well as deeper investor pools, said Mr Glenn Thum, research manager at Phillip Securities Research.

But without a coherent strategy, it would be hard to sustain investor attention and interest.

Mr Chan Yew Kiang, ASEAN and Singapore IPO leader at EY, said: “When you are listed in a market that you don’t operate in, you are not visible enough. I’m not surprised if a lot of US investors don’t even know these companies exist, they are so small that the news networks will also not invite them to talk about themselves.”

But Ms Tay Hwee Ling, capital markets services leader at Deloitte South-east Asia, noted that “it does not necessarily mean it is wrong for a small counter to go to a big exchange”.

“It really depends on whether you are able to optimise the capital markets to continue to shine and catch the attention of investors.

“If your objective is to just list and take the first batch of IPO funds, then it’s expected that you will see the outcome that you see right now,” she cautioned.

Still, those with plans to expand their business operations in the US are unlikely to be deterred from listing there.

Semiconductor optics company MetaOptics announced in November its plans for a dual listing on Nasdaq, shortly after its strong debut on the Catalist board on Sept 9.

Chief executive Mark Thng said the objective of a potential US listing was for practical business reasons and not merely another fund-raising exercise. The company plans to build a facility in the US that can offer quick prototypes for its customers based there.

“Our venture into the US is primarily customer-driven, we have world-class customers that we want to collaborate with. We are not going to be like other companies that have gone to the US to list, get all the proceeds and move everything back to Singapore.”

He added that the company’s successful listing on SGX has helped to raise its profile and credibility in the US market. “As we go international, we hope that we can be an example for other local companies to follow and be successful too.”

Correction note: In an earlier version of the story, we said SGX closed the year with 13 listings instead of 16. This has been updated.