Increasing the price range? Remember that? Well, in the past few months,
it has been a rare thing. But it did happen last week to
Transmeta, which
plans to have its IPO this week. And the increase was substantial – going
from $11-$13 to $16-$19. This was impressive, given the fact that IBM said
it would not use Transmeta’s chip for one of its new laptops.
Okay, there were still some problems. There were a variety of withdrawals,
including the postponement of Qualcomm’s spinoff, it’s Spinco division.
Basically, Spinco’s business includes circuit
chips, integrated system software and the Snaptrack location-tracking
technologies.
In fact, last month there were 48 withdrawals.
Despite this, we did see a great IPO from
Optical Communications
Products. Priced at $11, the stock soared to $17.88 on its first day of
trading. In all, the company raised $116 million and the market cap hit
about $1.83 billion.
The company is a developer of advanced fiber optic components for long-haul
networks (mostly in metropolitan areas). It was definitely helpful that the
company has a solid growth history. The company has been profitable since
1995. In the first six months of 2000, revenues were $69.1 million, which
compares to $23.3 million in the same period a year ago. Net profits were
$16.7. Customers include Ciena, Cisco, Nortel Networks and Marconi.
It would not be surprising to see more strength from this stock, especially
as Nasdaq rallies and so do the fiber optic stocks.
Actually, the strong performance of Optical Communications Products should
bode well for another IPO this week:
Luminent. This
company develops sophisticated components for the metro area optical
networks (kind of sounds familiar, huh?). The customer base is strong – with
such biggies as Marconi, Cisco and Foundry Networks.
For the first six months of 2000, revenues increased 53.1 percent to $43.6
million. Net profits were $2.3 million.
The lead underwriter is CS First Boston and the price range is $13-$15 (the
company intends to issue 12 million shares). The proposed ticker symbol is
LMNE.
