The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering letting public companies report earnings only twice a year, according to The Wall Street Journal. But that would be unlikely to usher in an IPO wave.
The growing access to unlimited private capital, coupled with regulatory changes over the past two decades, has resulted in fewer and fewer companies choosing to go public. Regulators and investors have been looking for new ways to reverse that trend.
“Founders could view [the] proposed change as directionally positive for the IPO pipeline, and it addresses a potential friction point,” said Mike Bellin, PwC’s US head of IPOs. “However, it is unlikely to be the decisive variable that unlocks a wave of unicorn IPOs.”
The SEC could publish its proposal as soon as next month, according to The Wall Street Journal. It would then be subject to the usual process: a 30-day public comment period, followed by a commission vote. So there are no guarantees that the changes will happen.
And while some mid-cap companies could be swayed to take the public listing leap because of the change, the high-flying companies seen as true bellwethers for the IPO window would still feel pressure to stick to the quarterly cadence.
“Their investor base and their lenders, who they also have for many of their convertible note structures, are going to require quarterly financial reports in any event,” said Albert Vanderlaan, head of capital markets at Orrick.
Case in point: Many companies listed on UK and European exchanges, which are only required to report twice a year, still elect to do so every quarter.
“The companies that do go public because of this change...aren’t the companies that most people would want to invest in out of the gate,” said Kyle Stanford, PitchBook’s director of US venture capital research.
Meanwhile, the growing sophistication of the secondaries market—on top of seemingly unlimited private capital supply—has nearly eliminated the pressure for mature VC-backed companies to go public.
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Still, for some sectors such as biotech, the proposed shift could be quite welcome. Pre-clinical biotech companies could avoid some of the dramatic stock fluctuations that can occur after missing earnings expectations. For small and mid-cap companies, avoiding that short-termism may be a compelling sell.
“The long-term viability of remaining a public company with that additional cost certainly hits the bottom line,” Vanderlaan said. “Companies with a $2 to $10 billion dollar market cap, for example, that certainly is an impactful amount of money.”
Biotech IPOs had a strong start to the year, with Generate Biomedicines and Eikon Therapeutics alone raising more than $700 million in total via public listings. But that’s not enough to shake off the industry’s nerves after a very slow 2025.
And for everyone else, the change probably wouldn’t amount to much. As PwC’s Bellin pointed out, what actually matters are “the interest rate and macro environment, the M&A exit alternative, public company preparedness and whether the gap between private round valuations and public market comps has narrowed enough for founders and their VC sponsors to accept IPO price discovery.”
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