(Yicai) March 22 -- A record of 77 initial public offering applications in the Chinese mainland were withdrawn by companies or canceled so far this year, as the China Securities Regulatory Commission stepped up supervision on IPO reviews.

Seventy-five companies voluntarily withdrew their IPO applications this year, according to data from financial information provider Wind. Of them, 22 had applied to get listed on the main boards of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange, 20 on the Beijing Stock Exchange, 24 on the SZE’s ChiNext technology board, and nine on the SSE’s Star Market technology board. The remaining two IPO applications were canceled.

Moreover, the number of approved IPO applications fell this year. Since the beginning of January, only 26 companies completed their listings, down 50 percent from a year earlier, Wind data showed. They raised CNY21.9 billion (USD3 billion), down nearly 60 percent in the period.

The increased number of IPO withdrawals has something to do with the tighter regulatory supervision, an industry insider told Yicai. Now, companies applying to go public need to deliberately consider and adjust projects and be more meticulous during application procedures as the sampling proportion of on-site checks of IPO applicants has increased, the insider added.

The CSRC recently introduced a new IPO application supervision policy to strictly revise the listing of new stocks and increase the proportion of random sampling and on-site checks of IPO applicants.

The CSRC will also conduct checks on companies that have withdrawn their applications, as they would be held accountable or penalized if violations are found, Yan Bojin, the securities watchdog’s chief risk officer and head of the public offering supervision department, said at a recent press conference.

The threshold for IPOs is rising, according to the most recent policy document on IPOs released by the CSRC. The regulator will strictly control many aspects of IPO applicants, such as corporate governance, financial data, dividend distribution plans, asset pricing, and financing purpose and probability. Moreover, it will introduce a regular on-site supervision mechanism to monitor firms intending to go public while making intermediary agencies and stock exchanges accountable for potential auditing violations.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione