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US IPO Characteristics 1980-2020

This week, I came across this article by The Economist, and is attracted by the chart showing the median sales and % profitable trending in the past 40 years in the US. I did some research and found this data source by Jay Ritter at the University of Florida and did my own viz on it.

My Visualization

I am basically looking at the same two data points as The Economist – % IPO profitable and median sales at IPO, but the difference is that I plot tech IPOs and others (excluding Biotech) side by side with bar charts at the bottom showing their differences.

Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

Dashboard link

Insights

  • Overall, we have seen % IPO that are profitable trending down in the past 40 years, in both tech and non-tech sectors;
  • But since 2000s, seems like people are much more acceptable with tech IPOs that are not not profitable, comparing to non-tech, as their difference became much larger than before;
  • Meanwhile, we are seeing the median sales trending up for both tech and non-tech, though non-tech generally speaking has much higher sales, and the difference between tech and non-tech is also increasing.

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