A contracting market
The UK equity market is getting smaller. Since 2015, the number of listed companies has fallen by 32%. The IPO pipeline has all but dried up: from 126 listings in 2021 to roughly 18 in 2024. More than 150 companies have left the London Stock Exchange since early 2024 alone, through delistings, take-privates, and migrations to other exchanges.
These are not fringe companies departing a healthy market. The contraction runs across sectors and market caps, driven by a combination of regulatory burden, valuation discounts relative to US peers, and a growing perception that the cost of being publicly listed in London no longer justifies the benefits. Whether or not that perception is accurate, it is reshaping the landscape in which every remaining listed company operates.
For IR teams, the instinct might be to see fewer competitors as good news. Less noise, more capital to go around, greater visibility for those that stay. The reality is more complicated, and in several important respects, the opposite is true.
Competing for attention
A shrinking market does not simply redistribute attention among the remaining companies. It shrinks the entire ecosystem that generates attention in the first place. Fewer listed companies means fewer analysts covering the market. Fewer analysts means less research, less media coverage, and fewer investment professionals whose job it is to understand your sector. The infrastructure of attention — the brokers, journalists, conference organisers, and specialist funds — contracts alongside the market itself.
For large caps, this matters less. They have established analyst coverage, index inclusion, and the scale to command attention regardless of market conditions. For mid and small caps, the effect is acute. A company that once had three analysts covering it may now have one, or none. The specialist fund that held a meaningful position may have closed or consolidated into a generalist strategy. The conference that provided annual access to fifty investors may have been cancelled.
The result is that the remaining companies are competing harder for a finite and potentially shrinking pool of investor attention. In this environment, the quality of a company's communications is not a secondary consideration. It is a primary determinant of whether the company is visible to investors at all.
The mid-cap squeeze
Mid-cap companies face a particular version of this challenge. They cannot out-resource large caps, who have dedicated IR teams, agency rosters, and the gravitational pull of index inclusion. They cannot out-hustle small caps, where a founder-CEO can personally call every significant shareholder and the equity story is often a single compelling narrative.
Mid-caps sit in the middle, with complex businesses that require sophisticated storytelling but without the resources or structural advantages of either end. It is telling that 50% of mid-cap IR teams cite storytelling as their number-one challenge — the highest proportion of any market-cap segment. They know their narrative matters; they struggle to get it right.
The broader market confirms this priority. Narrative and storytelling shows a net planned time increase of 54 percentage points among IR teams — the third-largest shift of any IR activity. The industry is collectively recognising that in a market with fewer companies and less analyst coverage, the equity story has to do more of the heavy lifting.
This is not about producing glossier annual reports or hiring better copywriters. It is about building a coherent narrative that runs consistently through every investor touchpoint: the website, results presentations, regulatory announcements, roadshow materials, and direct engagement. Companies that treat these as separate workstreams, each managed by a different team or vendor, end up with a fragmented story that undermines itself.
A changing investor base
The composition of UK equity ownership has shifted dramatically over the past half-century. Individual ownership of UK quoted shares stood at 54% in 1963. Today it is 11.6%. International and institutional investors now dominate the register, bringing different expectations, different time horizons, and different communication preferences.
But the picture is not one-directional. The rise of DIY investment platforms is rebuilding a retail investor base, albeit one that looks very different from the private shareholders of the 1960s. These are digitally native investors who research companies online, expect on-demand access to information, and make decisions based on what they can find through search engines and social media.
Listed companies now need to communicate effectively across both audiences: institutional investors who expect detailed financial analysis and direct access to management, and retail investors who expect accessible content and responsive digital platforms. The companies that default to one audience at the expense of the other are leaving value on the table — either institutional capital that demands rigour, or retail loyalty that demands accessibility.
Communications as infrastructure
In a contracting market, the companies that communicate well will capture a disproportionate share of whatever investor attention remains. This is not a speculative claim. It follows directly from the market dynamics: fewer analysts, less coverage, more competition for visibility. The companies that make it easy for investors to understand their business, access their data, and engage with their management will stand out. The ones that do not will be overlooked.
The best companies treat investor communications as infrastructure, not as a project. The equity story, the investor platform, events, media engagement, and regulatory compliance all function as an integrated system. Each element reinforces the others. A results announcement drives traffic to the investor platform. The platform provides context for the regulatory filings. Events build relationships that make the next fundraise more efficient.
This is the approach Copia takes with clients across the market-cap spectrum: building communications systems where each component amplifies the rest. In a market with 32% fewer companies but no less complexity, that kind of integrated infrastructure is not a luxury. It is what separates the visible from the overlooked.