Voronoi's IPO withdrawal to cool down private company stock trading

Promotional image of Voronoi / Courtesy of Voronoi

By Anna J. Park

The recent IPO withdrawal by biotech unicorn company Voronoi sent shockwaves rippling through the financial industry, which is expected to cool down the country's private equity trading market.

The new drug developer decided to cancel its IPO plan last week by submitting official renouncement documents to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), following a poor result from its book-building process from institutional investors.

Due to the tepid response from institutional investors to its IPO stock allotment survey, the bio unicorn retracted its original plan of going public slated for the end of this month.

It is the third time this year alone that a company scheduled to go public has dropped its IPO plans, following Hyundai Engineering in January and Daemyung Energy in February.

Watchers say external factors played a key part in the IPO market losing steam, citing the global economic outlook, rising interest rates and heightened instability amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, apart from the companies' competencies.

As Voronoi could have been the country's first unicorn startup that would go public via the streamlined process for the special listing track of the Korea Exchange (KRX), now the market is closely watching whether private stock trading would be negatively impacted by the IPO failure.

Market sentiment has totally changed from a couple years ago, when both venture capital investments as well as private stock trading had enjoyed peaks amid an IPO market craze.

Against that backdrop, some institutional investors that hold private equities of companies with IPO plans, such as e-commerce firm Kurly and K bank, are selling off part of their stocks, aiming to retrieve a portion of their invested capital before the IPOs. Newly listed companies' lackluster stock market performances also influenced such moves.