Is London’s stock market being sold off? -

When easyJet’s board agreed to a £5.7 billion takeover from US private equity firm Apollo Global Management in early August, most coverage focused on what it meant for passengers, staff and the airline’s founding family. That misses the more interesting story underneath it. EasyJet is the latest, most visible entry in a long list of London-listed companies recently agreeing to leave the public market, usually at the hands of a private equity buyer who thinks the shares are worth more than the market is paying. Why does London keep losing its listed businesses, and what does that mean for anyone who holds shares, has a pension, or cares about Britain’s standing as a place to do business?

How big is this pattern, actually?

EasyJet’s deal is worth examining on its own terms first. Apollo’s offer valued the airline at £7.15 a share, having seen off a rival bid from US firm Castlelake after months of back and forth, and the transaction is expected to complete by early 2027.

It is a genuinely large deal by UK standards, but it is far from the largest of the year. That distinction currently belongs to Intertek, the testing and certification group, which agreed to be bought by Swedish private equity firm EQT in a transaction valuing it at £10.6 billion including debt, a 40% premium to where the shares had been trading and reportedly the third-largest take-private in UK corporate history.

Around the same time, energy distribution firm DCC Energy agreed to a £5.7 billion takeover from a private consortium, and FTSE 100 warehouse and logistics group Segro agreed to a £14 billion offer from the American property group Prologis. Taken together with several smaller deals still working their way through, analysts at AJ Bell calculate that takeovers of London-listed firms already in progress this year amount to more than £69 billion, making 2026 the highest-value year for this kind of activity since the pandemic.

What makes this worth a proper explanation is that none of these companies were in obvious distress. Intertek tests products and certifies supply chains for manufacturers and governments in more than a hundred countries, a business with steady, unglamorous demand that has little direct connection to how the UK economy itself is performing. DCC Energy and Segro were both established, profitable FTSE constituents with long operating histories. These were not rescue deals for struggling firms. They were buyers spotting companies they judged to be trading well below what they were actually worth, and moving to take advantage of that gap while it remained open.

It also helps to see how far back this actually goes, because the current wave can look like a sudden news cycle if you only follow the headlines from the past few months. Research from McKinsey found that nearly 200 UK companies were delisted from the London Stock Exchange through private acquisitions between 2016 and 2023, and that only two of them have since returned to public ownership. That is close to two hundred businesses that simply stopped being available for ordinary investors to buy shares in, most of them for good.

Why is this happening now?

The most consistently cited explanation is valuation. UK shares have traded at a persistent discount to their American and European equivalents for several years now, a gap that recent listing reforms in London have so far failed to close in any meaningful way. For a private equity buyer, that discount is precisely the opportunity.

A company’s public share price gives a prospective acquirer something concrete to aim at when they are planning a bid and working out how much value they think they can unlock once the business is out of public hands. When that share price sits well below what a buyer believes the underlying business is genuinely worth, the arithmetic of a takeover becomes hard to resist, particularly when private equity firms are under pressure to put a large amount of raised capital to work.

There is a second, less discussed factor worth understanding too. Once a company is public, it has to answer to shareholders every quarter, publish detailed results, and often manage its strategy around short-term market expectations rather than longer-term plans. Private ownership removes that pressure, at least for a while, giving new owners more room to restructure a business, change its direction, or simply run it more efficiently without a share price reacting to every decision in real time. For a firm like Intertek, whose revenue comes overwhelmingly from outside the UK anyway, that freedom from public market scrutiny can matter more to a buyer than any particular attachment to Britain as a location.

None of this happens in a vacuum, and it is fair to note that UK policymakers are alert to the pattern rather than ignoring it. The government has pushed through reforms intended to make London listings more attractive, including simplified rules for shareholder approvals and changes designed to encourage pension funds to hold more UK equities. Early signs, such as a tripling of IPO proceeds in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period the year before, suggest some of this is having an effect. Whether it can outpace the rate at which existing companies are being bought out and taken private is a genuinely open question.

What does this mean, for you and for UK business more broadly?

For anyone holding shares directly in a company that gets taken private, the immediate effect is usually straightforward and, in the short term, pleasant. Takeover offers typically come with a premium over the recent share price, which is exactly why easyJet’s stock rose on the news of Apollo’s bid. Shareholders who sell into that offer walk away with more than the market had been valuing their shares at the day before.

The less pleasant side is what happens afterwards. Once a company goes private, ordinary investors lose the ability to hold a stake in whatever it becomes next, whether that is a stronger, better-run business or something less successful, because they are no longer able to buy or sell its shares on the open market. For anyone invested in a UK index tracker fund through a workplace pension, which describes a large share of the country, this pattern also means a slow reshaping of what that pension actually owns, as familiar household names quietly disappear from the index over time.

The wider implications for UK business are arguably more significant, even if they are less immediately visible. A shrinking pool of large, listed UK companies makes the London market a less compelling place for the next generation of businesses to consider listing on, and for investors deciding where to put long-term capital. Fewer big listings mean fewer companies pulling in analyst coverage, media attention and investor interest, which in turn keeps valuations lower than they might otherwise be, feeding the very conditions that make British companies attractive takeover targets in the first place. It is a pattern that has some tendency to reinforce itself, and reversing it is proving considerably harder than starting it was.

A market correction, or a market in decline?

It would be a mistake, though, to treat every take-private deal as evidence that Britain is losing something irreplaceable. Companies like Intertek earn the overwhelming majority of their revenue overseas regardless of where they are listed, and a change of ownership does not necessarily change where a business operates or who it employs. Some economists argue this wave of consolidation could ultimately leave London’s remaining listed companies stronger, and that recent reforms simply need more time to rebuild the pipeline of new listings. Others see a market hollowing out faster than anything is arriving to replace it.

Both views are being argued in good faith from the same set of numbers, and it is too early to say which will look correct in five years’ time. What’s clear is that the pattern behind easyJet’s takeover isn’t going away on its own.

Is private equity spotting genuine value that the public market has been mispricing, or a symptom of something more troubling about London’s ability to hold on to the companies that built its reputation in the first place?

💼 Unpacked

Take-private — The process of a publicly listed company being bought and removed from the stock market, so its shares are no longer available to trade openly. Ownership shifts to a private buyer, often a private equity firm.

Private equity — Investment firms that raise large pools of money from institutions and wealthy investors to buy companies outright, rather than buying small stakes on the stock market. They typically aim to restructure or grow the business before selling it on.

Valuation discount — When a company’s share price is lower than what analysts judge the underlying business to genuinely be worth, often relative to similar companies listed elsewhere. This gap is central to why UK firms have become attractive takeover targets.

Index tracker fund — A type of investment fund that simply holds all the companies in a stock market index, such as the FTSE 100, in the same proportions. Many UK workplace pensions are invested this way, which is why delistings affect people who’ve never bought an individual share.

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LinkedIn: Vinay Meisuria