Another blow to AIM as investment firm Adams prepares to exit

Another small UK company is preparing to delist from AIM as the London junior market continues to shrink.

Investment firm Adams said on Thursday it will delist from the AIM exchange early next month after shareholders voted to approve the cancellation of its shares.

The group, which is based in the Isle of Man, last month announced plans to leave London’s junior stock market, citing the high costs and legal burden associated with having a public listing.

He also said that the “limited liquidity” of the company’s shares makes its share price more volatile and “no longer sufficiently provides” it with greater access to capital in the medium and long term.

Adams investors accepted a resolution at an extraordinary general meeting on Wednesday for the group to carry out the delisting, meaning the shares will cease trading on the stock exchange. target market starting at 7 a.m. on December 5.

London’s AIM market allows smaller, high-growth companies to raise money without being subject to the same regulations as larger exchanges.

The number of companies on the AIM market recently fell below 700 for the first time since 2001, according to accounting firm UHY Hacker Young.

Concerns about changes to inheritance tax relief ahead of the Budget led more than two dozen companies to leave AIM after the July general election.

While Chancellor Rachel Reeves did not announce that the tax exemption would be abolished, she did say that shares listed on AIM would be subject to a 20 per cent inheritance tax rate.

Many analysts believe this will discourage investor interest in British small caps, which Adams says have suffered from weaker liquidity and access to growth capital in recent years.

He believes that many companies in his portfolio are “in a situation where their current public market valuations do not reflect their underlying potential and there is no indication that these markets are expected to recover in the foreseeable future.”

As a result, it believes its strategy of investing in small to mid-market capitalization sectors in the UK and Europe is attractive and has decided not to make any further investments.

Instead, Adams will undertake an “orderly realization” of its current investments and return capital to shareholders.

Company bosses acknowledged that, due to the low liquidity of their shares, shareholders who wanted to sell their shares “may have difficulty finding buyers.”

Adams will therefore buy the shares at 4p each before cancellation.

Adams’ holdings include Griffin Mining, which operates a zinc-gold project in China, drug developer C4X Discovery, medical device maker NIOX Group and computer vision technology company Seeing Machines.

After this, it is expected to be voluntarily dissolved or subject to administrative dissolution.