Battle over IPO listings to heat up

By Phil Wahba

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The initial public offerings market might still be cool despite a few recent deals, but the main North American stock exchanges are already wooing companies so they can snag new listings and the revenues and branding that IPOs bring once the market recovers.

Compared to the last downturn, after the tech bubble bust earlier this decade, the pipeline remains full of mature, profitable companies, the heads of major exchanges said at the Reuters Global Exchanges and Trading Summit this week.

With the exchanges' traditional specialties fading, they are now aggressively going after a diverse array of companies.

"We're not looking at the floodgates to open," NYSE Euronext Inc (NYX.N) Chief Executive Duncan Niederauer said, adding that the exchange would fight for listings.

Earlier this year, the New York Stock Exchange made its rules more flexible to make it easier for earlier stage tech and biotech companies to qualify for a listing.

"We had abdicated the high tech space to the competition," Niederauer said.

That competition, chiefly archrival Nasdaq OMX Group (NDAQ.O), has made it clear it won't leave any IPOs on the table either, saying it will go after financial services companies even if they have traditionally preferred the Big Board.

"Remember that the financial services companies within Nasdaq have performed better because we did not have some of those issues maybe that the large ones had," said Nasdaq OMX President Magnus Bocker, referring to the toxic assets that nearly felled NYSE-listed banks such as Bank of America (BAC.N) and Citigroup