Here is an intresting article from Money morning.
“Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (NYSE: GS) initial public offerings (IPO) guru Tom Tuft has joined Bruce Wasserstein’s Lazard Ltd. (NYSE: LAZ) as chairman of Global Capital Markets Advisory and vice-chairman of its U.S. investment banking, in what could be a sign that the market for IPOs is thawing.
Tuft, a 33-year Goldman vet who co-founded its equity capital markets business in 1985 and became its chairman in 2004, was involved in several high-profile IPOs, including those of The Estee Lauder Companies Inc. (NYSE: EL) and RJR Nabisco Inc. He also advised Lazard on its own IPO in 2005.
A slowdown in mergers and acquisitions has prompted Lazard to expand its equity capital markets and restructuring operations, working on nine of the top 10 bankruptcies this year, Bloomberg News reported. Capital raised by IPOs in the first half of this year was $11.4 billion, down 85% from the same period last year according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“There is demand for companies to come public,” David Menlow, president of IPOFinancial.com told Bloomberg. “The fact that we haven’t seen that many is not an indication that companies are not out there ready to come public.”
The article continues.
The “Silicon Valley Six”
“An informal poll of venture capitalists and others conducted by Reuters yielded six successful companies with revenue of $100 million or more in Silicon Valley that are ripe for acquisition or an IPO, excluding social networking sensations Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. The news service dubbed the companies the “Silicon Valley Six,” which were chosen out of 34 citied in sectors ranging from alternative energy to video games.
The top four companies found were social network LinkedIn Corp., solar panel maker Solyndra Inc., smart grid company Silver Spring Networks and Zynga Inc., which develops games that run on social networks like Facebook or New Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace.
The other two are Guidewire, which develops software for property and casualty companies, and LiveOps, which operates call centers from contractors that work from their homes.
“They are exciting because they…demonstrate what is possible with venture capital,” Sharon Wienbar, managing director of Scale Venture Partners told Reuters. “These are companies that have proven a new, attractive business model that works big in spaces.”
Venture capitalists’ rule of thumb for declaring a company ripe for an IPO is that a company must have $100 million in sales and have a capitalization of about $1 billion in order to have enough money to meet the reporting structures of the Sarbanes-Oxley act.
“The market is in the early stages of being back,” LiveOps Chief Executive Officer Maynard Webb said. “The market is ripe and open today for great companies.”
While not mentioned in Reuters’ “Silicon Valley Six,” one private company that’s making waves in Silicon Valley is PopCap Games Inc., which publishes and develops easy-to-play, accessible “casual” video games.”
Read the full article here.
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