The average amount of accounting and legal fees disclosed by IPO companies slightly declined in 2017. Compared to 2016, average accounting fees in 2017 decreased 10% to $0.85 million and average legal fees decreased 16% to $1.42 million.
Audit Analytics previously observed that average accounting fees disclosed by IPO companies have been unsteady since 2008, reaching a low of $0.64 million in 2011 and a high of $1.16 million in 2013. Within the past nine years, average legal fees have fluctuated between a low of $1.32 million in 2008 and a high of $1.85 million in 2013.
As noted by the Markets Insider, 2017 proved to be an active year for global IPO activity with a 49% increase of global IPOs registered from 2016 to 2017 and a 40 % increase in the amount of capital raised by IPOs since 2016. As indicated in the table above, total proceeds raised by U.S. IPO companies in 2017 increased for the first time in three years. The total proceeds from U.S. IPOs reached $48 billion in 2017, doubling from $24 billion in 2016.
As a percentage of total proceeds from these IPOs, total accounting and legal fees dropped in 2017. The total accounting and legal fees as a percentage of the total IPO proceeds steadily increased from .94% in 2014 to 1.4% in 2016, before decreasing to 1% in 2017.
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