IPO Weekly: A Loudcloud on the Horizon
Mar 02 2001
This week, all that IPO investors had to chew on was chicken and biscuits: AFC Enterprises - which operates restaurant chains Popeye's Chicken & Biscuits, Church's Chicken, Cinnabon, Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia - rose 18 percent after its Friday debut. Next week comes something a little tastier: the long-awaited IPO for Loudcloud .
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Loudcloud, co-founded by Netscape legend Marc Andreessen, offers software to make corporate Internet operations more efficient. On Tuesday, the company announced an agreement with AOL
The proposed $180 million deal is set to price Wednesday. Led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the offering was repriced three weeks ago. Originally, the company was going to offer 10 million shares at between $10 and $12 each. Now it plans to sell 20 million shares at a price between $8 and $10 a share.
Last year, the company's first full year of operation, Loudcloud lost $49 million on sales of just under $2 million.
- Besides Loudcloud, four other offerings are on the calendar for next week. Biotech firm Seattle Genetics expects to price its $84 million offering led by J.P. Morgan and CIBC on Monday. The three other deals, Encore Acquisition , Iasis Healthcare and Stelmar Shipping, are not tech-related.
- ATT Wireless, less than a year removed from the company's record $10.6 billion public offering, floated $6.5 billion in bonds on Thursday.
- On Monday, Lucent's Agere Systems unit revised the terms of its offering for the second time. It now plans to offer 500 million shares for between $12 and $14 a share. The deal, led by Morgan Stanley, has maintained the total offering price, a maximum of $7 billion, but increased the number of shares while cutting the offering price.
- Four companies withdrew their filings this week - consultancy eResearch Technology, business-to-business plays Partminer and Ironside Technologies , and genomic-information firm Genometrix .