London stock market listing of up to £45bn looms as GSK investors vote for demerger

theguardian.com:

Investors in the British pharmaceuticals giant GSK have voted to approve a demerger of its consumer brands into a new company, Haleon, firing the starting gun on the largest London stock market listing in a decade.

Shares in Haleon are scheduled to start trading on Monday 18 July, after investors in GSK – previously GlaxoSmithKline – voted to approve the demerger. The FTSE 100 company won 99.8% of the votes cast at a general meeting on Wednesday at a hotel by London’s Heathrow airport.

Haleon, whose portfolio of brands will include Sensodyne toothpaste and Advil and Panadol painkillers, is expected to seek a valuation of as much as £45bn.

The approval paves the way for a listing which will be used to gauge of the financial strength of the City of London after Brexit, with the formation of a company all but certain to join its current owner on the FTSE 100 index of blue-chip shares. The last stock market listing on a similar scale was mining and commodity company Glencore’s entry at a £38bn market value in 2011.

London looks set to lose out to New York for the planned return to public markets of Arm, the Cambridge chip designer owned by Japan’s Softbank. The UK government has lobbied hard for Arm to have a secondary listing in London, amid concerns it could lose out on another large UK-based flotation.

The London Stock Exchange has been described as in “secular decline”, with a fall in the number of listed companies from over 4,400 in the early 1960s to less than 1,200 today. Morrison’s supermarket exited the exchange last year, the biggest in a wave of private equity takeovers triggered when share prices fell during the pandemic.

The new company will employ 23,000 employees across 100 countries. Its operations made revenues of