Webtoon and the IPO Landscape

Jeff, I mean today a big day for Webtoon and interestingly South Korea based never is the company that sort of backs it. So we're seeing more international companies coming to the US to list. That's right on NASDAQ this year we've had 64 IPOs and nearly half of those have come from international. And so we've had Webtoon from Korea. We had super high out of Asia, we had Merricks at the UK for Ovial out of Spain, all looking to come to the US capital markets because frankly, you can get a better valuation and the capital markets are wider and deeper here in the US. That's not uniformly true though, right? The chat around Xi'an is so interesting to me. They seem to be looking at london-based on the political tension between the US and China. That was a headline that I think crossed while I was on vacation. I was very surprised to see it. What would the factor in that case be to your mind? Yeah, I think there's always unique aspects to every deal. What we really focus on here at NASDAQ is trying to provide a great platform to support all of our companies from across the world. That includes having a great trading platform, supporting companies with our investor relations insights and really helping them on their sustainability journeys. Are there fewer Chinese companies though eyeing the US? I'm sorry, are there fewer Chinese related names eyeing the US to go public? You know, I think we still see a lot of strong demand from around the globe. It's not just China over in Asia, but we have a lot of interest out of Southeast Asia. You know, not just Korea, like where Webtoon is from, but Vietnam, Indonesia, lots of other company countries over in Asia are also looking to come to the US. Yeah, Vin Fast is an interesting example of of a name from that region in this market. I, I trying to get a bigger picture sense of what's going on. Like we had this pocket of listings in in September of last year and we started the year with some energy and we're showing a graphic on the screen now of all the VC back names that we've waiting for ages to give us a signal ongoing public. What where are we in this market broadly at this moment in time, Jeff? We do have a very strong pipeline of VC backed tech companies that are looking to go public over I'd say the next 12 to 18 months. This year. The story really has been more about private equity backed companies, companies in the healthcare sector. We've had some great names out of biotech. We just had Lineage Logistics filed publicly yesterday. That's going to be the largest cold storage REIT in the US. So a lot of the more kind of steadier growth, highly profitable companies and I think some of the the venture backed tech companies, we expect to see more activities out of those in 2025. We were just hearing though how we've now got a new record setter for valuation in the US private markets that being SpaceX. Many might think that Elon Musk would IA Texas based exchange as and when that becomes a reality. Jeff, what do you think of the competition? Well, I think frankly we endorse competition. I think the US capital markets are unique in that we not only compete for listings in the US, but we also compete for all the trading volume. That's the way the SEC has set up the market structure here in the US So it's highly competitive. There's actually 16 different exchanges in the US, There's dozens of different internalizers and dark pools across the US And I think that competition is one of the things that drives such great outcomes for our listed companies. It's why we invest so much in our technology to provide a great trading platform. It's why we have to differentiate our value proposition to provide great marketing and visibility to our listed companies and then of course all of the the data and insights to help them understand who's buying and selling their stock every day.