Australia has proved itself to be strong enough to deal with the worst conditions, and has raised a record $60 billion of new equity over the past financial year.

It has been revealed by research conducted by corporate advisory firm KPMG that private placements provided a big chunk of the funding, helping raise over $36.5 billion of new equity. The lead contributors were National Australia Bank ($3 billion), Westfield ($2.9 billion), Westpac ($2.5 billion) and ANZ ($2.5 billion).

The 2008-09 financial year also focused more on rights issue as companies targeted for short raising periods with greater price certainty.

Via taking up rights on shares, shareholders tipped in more than $25 billion, not including Rio Tinto's $15 billion capital raising or Asciano's $2.3 billion. It should be noted that from the $12 billion raised in the previous financial year, the figure was more than double.

Rob Bazzani, KPMG's national head of mergers and acquisitions, said: "I think everyone was surprised that $60 billion had been raised given the conditions. It is a figure much bigger than we have seen historically, but its composition was different and reflected what was going on in the market."

He added: "There was a push to deleverage balance sheets and do it quickly when institutional support existed in the volatile market. So, placements came out the all- time winner with $36 billion in about 1100 placements compared to $25 billion by way of 300 rights issues. I think the stand-out issue was the level of initial public offerings
(IPOs) that were in the pipeline but withdrawn. The volatility meant high-quality IPOs like the Qantas Frequent Flyer program, Burrup Holdings, let alone things that private equity clients were preparing, didn't proceed."

The year saw less than 30 IPOs taking place, thus only $300 million could be raised, compared to the billions of dollars that have been raised in previous years.