One of life’s unfairnesses, officials at the London Stock Exchange sometimes grumble, is that high-profile flotation flops in the UK tend to be remembered for years whereas IPO disasters in New York are quietly forgotten as the locals move on and look for the next big thing. The complaint has some merit. Take Cazoo, whose car crash for investors would surely have generated many more headlines if it had happened in London.
The UK-based used-car website opted for a New York listing in 2021 because high-growth companies “are better understood by US investors”, as its founder, Alex Chesterman, put it at the time. Ho, ho. It turns out that the American assessment that Cazoo was worth $8bn (£6.4bn) could not have been more wrong.
