Delistings take shine off Aim growth The number of companies quitting the Alternative Investment Market has nearly doubled to 25 in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year. Ten delisted their shares from the junior market as a result of mergers and acquisitions in the three months to June. But there was a sharp rise to nine in the number of companies leaving because of financial stress or insolvency, according to UHY Hacker Young, the accountants. The report tempers hopes that Aim may have passed through the doldrums following news that rising numbers of companies have joined, or are planning to join, the market. The latest company to declare its intention to float on Aim is Chargemaster, which provides the points for charging electric cars. It will on Monday announce plans to raise about £6m to create a company with a market capitalisation of about £32m. Fifteen companies were admitted to Aim in the first quarter, and there were 15 IPOs between April and June, higher than in recent quarters. Laurence Sacker, partner of UHY Hacker Young, said: "While the number of new listings is up, this is outweighed by a substantial increase in the number of companies delisting from the market, so Aim is shrinking again." Figures from the LSE show that by May there were 1,087 companies listed on Aim, down from 1,694 at its peak in 2007. Though more than 40 companies in total quit Aim over the first six months of this year, the London Stock Exchange says the rate of attrition in the market has slowed compared to last year - in the first quarter of 2012 alone, 39 companies delisted from Aim. Mr Sacker underlined the sharp rise in companies delisting because of stress in the second quarter - suggesting that the recession is not over yet - and noted that in the first quarter just two companies blamed financial difficulties as the reason for quitting Aim. The second quarter often marks a seasonal high in companies going into administration. He added that recent market volatility had put paid to financier Guy Hands" planned €1bn float of Deutsche Annington, the property group, which was pulled abruptly last week because of adverse market condition. Mr Sacker suggests that other IPOs could be pulled for the same reason. Last week Plus500, an Israeli online trading platform that facilitates bets on shares and currencies, announced plans for an IPO that could value the group at $200m. Cyprus-domiciled Plus500 said it hoped to raise $50m on Aim through the listing of one-quarter of its share capital. Ibex Global Solutions, an operator of outsourced call centres, last month raised £10.7m on Aim. It followed information technology company Parity Group, which raised £7m, earlier this year; Gloucestershire-based Versarien, an engineering materials group; Cambridge Cognition, a computerised testing group; and Electrical Geodesics, a developer of brain-scanning technology to identify epilepsy and autism, that raised £8m. This compares with just four floats of technology companies on Aim during the whole of 2012.