Expected and Actual Proceeds from Share Issue on the Warsaw Stock Exchange

The paper aims to assess the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 – 2009 on the possibilities of raising capital through the initial public offerings (IPOs) on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE). The research carried out allowed to indicate the scale of divergences between the proceeds from the share issue in the process of IPO expected by enterprises and the actual proceeds. The adopted hypothesis states that the financial crisis not only added to the decrease in the number of IPOs, but also caused that enterprises issuing shares more often gained less capital than they originally aimed. The research sample consists of the companies which in the years 2006 – 2014 raised capital through IPO. The data used in the analysis was gathered from: 1) the prospectus with appendixes and current reports for each of the IPOs by the firms in the sample, 2) the WSE data, 3) the Central Statistical Office data. The analyses done allow to conclude that in the research sample both the number of the issues launched through IPO and their total value decreased, compared to the value from the pre-crisis period. While comparing the value of the expected proceeds from the share issue with the actual gross proceeds, one can clearly see that in the post-crisis period for companies which get proceeds at a lower than expected level their share increased. A similar correlation is observed for the issue price, i.e. more often the surveyed entities sold their shares at a lower than maximum price.