Here in the US, you can buy publicly traded companies in the US for a song; in fact, that was the source for the "acquiring" company in a lot of those reverse-acquisitions of the late 2000s / early 2010s: publicly traded companies that had a ticker, but were basically defunct. A company that wanted to go public without the scrutiny of an IPO process could "buy themselves" with the tiny, publicly traded company, thereby getting a ticker and access to retail investors. (This was not a good phenomenon, fwiw, though it definitely anticipated the SPAC craze... which was also not good, for similar reasons.)