Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

says investors this year have rewarded Canadian companies that have sold shares to fund acquisitions, and it’s urging firms to take more risks and pursue deals.

“We’re encouraging all of our clients to be bold,” Tyler Swan, managing director and global head of equity capital markets at CIBC, said. He said that equity deals used to fund

M&A

have been well received with “deep order books and strong after-market trading performance.”

CIBC is in second place on Bloomberg’s Canadian league table for equity and equity-linked financings, up five spots from last year. The lender has worked on 10 such transactions this year and received league table credit for $1.3 billion worth of volume, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Those deals include

Keyera Corp.

, which in June raised roughly $2.1 billion to buy the Canadian natural gas liquids business of Plains All American Pipeline LP. Keyera’s shares jumped on the news and have outperformed the S&P/TSX Energy Index since then. Similarly, CIBC advised

Capital Power Corp.

, which raised $517 million in April to acquire power plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio. That stock is up 20 per cent since that deal, sharply outperforming the Canadian utilities index.

Swan expects the momentum to continue, and a long-awaited upswing in initial public offerings in the back half of 2025 that will “accelerate” into 2026.

There is a “very big pipeline building in Canada,” he said of IPO candidates.

The last corporate IPO on Canada’s benchmark S&P/TSX Composite was

Groupe Dynamite Inc.

’s $300 million deal in November, which ended a nearly two-year dry spell on the country’s largest exchange.

“The IPO slowdown of the last 3+ years is not unique to Canada, but a global phenomenon,” said Shane Quinn, a spokesperson for TSX operator TMX Group Ltd. He said Canadian exchanges have seen new corporate listings this year driven primarily by cross-listings, including from Australia, and primarily on the small-cap focused S&P/TSX Venture Composite Index.

CIBC is listed as the lead underwriter on GO Residential Real Estate Investment Trust’s planned IPO in Toronto, according to a company filing. Other IPO candidates include generic drug manufacturer Apotex Inc., which is expected to debut in 2025. A handful of Canadian-headquartered companies have publicly mused about going public in coming years, including Porter Airlines and Toronto-based Vale Base Metals, which could be the largest materials IPO since Glencore’s.

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“We’ve had such a quiet IPO market,” Swan said. “We’re at a turning point, hopefully, in seeing that activity pick up in the Canadian market.”

Bloomberg.com