It’s no secret that the number of public companies has fallen off a cliff in recent decades, but this excerpt from a recent DLA Piper Blog provides some specifics using stats from the SEC’s new Statistics & Data Visualizations page:

– The total number of reporting issuers declined from 9,656 in 2004 to 7,902 in 2024, an approximately 18.2 percent decline. This period saw a peak of 10,598 reporting issuers in 2009 followed by a steady decline to a low of 7,475 reporting issuers in 2020.

– The percentage of reporting issuers that are US-domiciled exchange-listed companies has fluctuated, ranging from 40.1 percent in 2009 to 50.5 percent in 2022.

– The number of US-domiciled exchange-listed companies has decreased from 4,461 in 2004 to 3,929 in 2024, an approximately 12.1-percent decline, with some fluctuation.

– After declining to a low of 3,542 in 2018, US-domiciled exchange-listed companies increased to 4,408 in 2022 – an approximately 24-percent increase – before declining approximately 11 percent by 2024.

– The number of foreign-domiciled exchange-listed companies steadily increased from 392 in 2004 to 937 in 2024 (reaching a high of 1,009 in 2022).

– The percentage of reporting issuers that are foreign-domiciled exchange-listed companies nearly tripled from 4.1 percent in 2004 to 11.9 percent in 2024.

– The steepest decline in the number of issuers occurred among issuers of asset-backed securities (ABS), which rose to 2,102 in 2006 and decreased to just 236 in 2011.

I think it’s interesting to note that the decline in reporting issuers hasn’t been a straight line, and even more interesting to see how much foreign issuers have increased their presence in the US markets over the past two decades. Whether that trend will continue in the “America First” era remains to be seen. Given the role that mortgage-backed securities played in the financial crisis, it’s probably not a surprise to see the magnitude of the wipeout of asset-backed issuers that took place during the Great Recession.

– John Jenkins