The departure lounge
Posted on: 4 July 2026
Anyone in the City who has watched Arm choose Nasdaq, Wise move its primary quote across the Atlantic and the main market shed several dozen names in a single year will read the Datalogic affair with a flicker of recognition. It is the same illness, a little further along, described in Italian.
When the Volta family, through their Hydra holding, offered Datalogic's minority shareholders 5.82 euros a share, the releases spoke of a 36 per cent premium. Thirty-six per cent sounds like a gift. The question worth asking is a premium over what. It is measured against the last session before the announcement, which is to say against a price the market had already pushed to the floor. In 2018 the same share traded above 28 euros. The owners are buying the company back at roughly a fifth of that, and Intermonte's analysts reckon that against fundamentals the premium narrows to 9.6 per cent. The word premium quietly conceals its own base of calculation. That is the first tell.
It helps to slow down on the terms, because the story is less technical than it looks. A tender offer is the moment when whoever already controls a listed company proposes to buy the shares it does not yet own, the ones held by the market. Gather enough of them and the company can leave the exchange altogether; the British shorthand is take-private, the mechanics are identical. This week Milan saw two such offers launched at once, on Datalogic and on Tinexta, both with the exit as the declared aim. Not every current deal points there. In agribusiness, B.F. stays listed and the offer only tightens control. The gesture underneath is the same, and it is not the delisting in itself. It is the controlling shareholder taking the company back off the market.
The real question is why now, and why so many in a single quarter. The answer lies in what a listing is actually for. A company sits on an exchange for two concrete reasons. The first is to raise capital, to sell pieces of itself in order to fund what comes next. The second is to have a price, a liquid currency it can spend to buy other companies or to pay the people who run it. For a mid-sized firm followed by a handful of analysts, with thin trading in its own stock, neither works properly any more. Staying listed becomes mostly cost and constraint: the disclosure burden, and a price that punishes any bet aimed past the next quarter. At which point, for anyone who already holds the majority, the rational move is singular. Buy the rest, cheaply, off the floor the market itself has dug.
The single case reads that way. What turns interesting is when you lift your eyes, because Datalogic is not an exception, it is the rule made into a headline. In 2025 Milan's main market lost twelve companies to delisting and more than two billion euros of capitalisation, with not a single new flotation to set against them. For the first time in years the exits outnumbered the arrivals. One case says it better than any statistic: Braga Moro, listed and gone again after ten months. Long enough for a sense of déjà vu.
A London reader needs none of this translated. Last year EY counted eighty-eight companies that either delisted or moved their primary listing away from the capital, the most since 2009, with Just Eat, Flutter and Ashtead among them. By the autumn the main market held around 930 names, down from 972 at the start of the year, and London had dropped out of the world's top twenty venues for flotations, overtaken by the likes of Mexico and Oman. The barcode-scanner in Emilia and the FTSE stalwart booking its passage to New York are running versions of the same play.
Which leaves the question that matters, and the least comfortable of them. If a country's savings no longer flow into the shares of its own companies, where do they go. They go, and briskly, somewhere else. In Britain the figures are almost violent in their clarity: defined-contribution pension schemes have taken their allocation to domestic equities from something near forty per cent of their equity holdings a decade ago to single digits now, and by one long series UK-focused equity funds have shed north of a hundred billion pounds since 2004. The money is not missing. It has been rerouted, into global trackers weighted overwhelmingly towards American technology, and into government debt. Italy runs the identical circuit: bonds worth fifteen times the value of equities on the Milan market, most of them sovereign, and ETFs multiplying while they follow foreign indices led by the Nasdaq. Draghi and Letta set the mechanism down in black and white in their work on Europe's capital markets. The politics, meanwhile, walks the other way. Italy's last budget doubled the tax on financial transactions; Britain, gesturing at the same disease, weighs the nuclear option of ordering pension funds to hold domestic shares, which is the lever you reach for once the market will no longer draw the capital on its own merits.
In years of watching the transactions that actually shift the balance of things, I have learned that the important ones are almost always the quietest. An eighty-million offer for a maker of barcode readers makes no noise at all. It says something the front pages do not. A market whose dominant transaction is the exit rather than the entrance slowly changes what being listed even means. The exchange stops being the stage on which a company grows and becomes, more and more, a departure lounge to be left the moment it pays to leave. The company that lists is the exception. The one that goes is the norm.
The family taking Datalogic private to bet on artificial intelligence for five years, without a market marking it to sentiment every ninety days, is probably making the right call for itself. That is not where the problem sits. The question left open belongs to everyone else: what remains of a public market once the cleverest move, for anyone who genuinely controls a company, is to walk out of it. In Milan, as in London, the price still forms every morning. It is only that on the other side of the glass, fewer and fewer are left to read it.