BioCentury
ARTICLE | Finance

Where to play the game

October 27, 2003 8:00 AM UTC

European companies have two basic choices of where to list when they go public: they can go to their local exchange or to NASDAQ in the U.S. Conventional wisdom says European companies should go public on their local exchanges, as companies choosing the U.S. risk getting lost among the crowd, a particular danger for smaller European companies. But staying home can mean trading on a smaller and less visible exchange.

The experience of Flamel Technologies S.A. illustrates that European biotech companies can do well on NASDAQ, while the counterpoint of Actelion Ltd. shows that international investors will happily go to national European exchanges to invest in successful companies. Thus both strategies work, and in the end quality counts...