After a very shaky start, the initial public offering market rebounded last year. In the United States, IPOs jumped 47 percent in 2009 (from 43 offerings in 2008 to 63 last year), according to Renaissance Capital LLC. “It was not a great year, but definitely better than 2008,” says Simpson Thacher & Bartlett partner Joshua Ford Bonnie, who led The Blackstone Group L.P.’s $4.8 billion IPO in 2007, when 272 offerings hit the market ["Blackstone's Magician," April 2008].

Last year’s IPO market was conservative, cautious, and spearheaded by “mature companies with earnings track records, backed by private equity [rather than venture capitalists],” says Richard Truesdell, Jr., the cohead of the capital markets group at Davis Polk & Wardwell. (The firm ranked first as underwriter’s counsel and tied for first as issuer’s counsel in a Thomson Reuters survey based on number of issues last year.) “There was an appetite for larger, more stable companies.” Indeed, the first company to break the IPO moratorium last year was Truesdell’s client Mead Johnson Nutrition Company, a subsidiary of Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. Until Mead Johnson’s $828 million IPO came out in February 2009, the market was “totally dead,” says Truesdell. After that IPO, “people got optimistic”—prematurely, as it turned out, he says, because more IPOs didn’t really materialize until the summer and fall. It also took longer for the market to accept IPOs by early-stage companies, says Truesdell.

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