Thursday 22 October 2015 7:43 am

London Stock Exchange “confident” for 2015 after Worldpay IPO

The figures

The London Stock Exchange's revenue from continuing operations rose 12 per cent to £326.4m in the three months to the end of September, while headline income rose 85 per cent to £589.3m, it said today.

This was buoyed by its information services division, where revenue increased 44 per cent to £133.7m, on the back of good growth at the FTSE and contribution from Russell Indexes.

Its shares edged up 0.1 per cent to 2,440p per share in late morning trade.

Why it's interesting

The London Stock Exchange said the fourth quarter got off to a good start with the largest IPO on its London market this year, after Worldpay floated with a market cap of £4.8bn, and an encouraging pipeline of companies which are keen to float.

Other companies eyeing a London listing include tech firm Softcat, shares registrar Equiniti and retirement housebuilder McCarthy & Stone.

It also expects to book the biggest European IPO of this year, with Italy's Poste Italiane expected to go public, in an offering similar to the UK government's disposal of Royal Mail.

The group focused on delivering benefits from the continuing integration of FTSE Russell index operations, and on completing the disposal of Russell Investment Management, following full separation from the Indexes business.

The group agreed to sell asset management arm of Russell Investments to US private equity firm TA Associates for £752m.

What LSE said

Xavier Rolet, the group's chief executive, said:

"We have started the fourth quarter well, with the successful IPO of Worldpay, the largest UK new issue so far in 2015, and the expected IPO of Poste Italiane which will be the largest in Europe this year.

We remain focused on executing on a wide range of attractive growth opportunities and continuing to deliver on our strategy to be a leading globally diversified open access market infrastructure business.