Liquidnet Holdings Inc. has filed for an initial public offering to sell up to $500 million as the nominal securities amount. This is going to be a somewhat more complicated IPO as the structure appears to have A shares and B shares, and the company has not taken any applied stock ticker and has not yet established which stock exchange it will list on.
The underwriting group is rather large. Its lists Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse as the lead underwriters, and other managers are listed as Liquidnet (itself), JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, and Sandler O’Neill.
The company is an electronic marketplace for institutional investors to trade equity securities worldwide for buyers and sellers of large blocks of equity securities. This is essentially an old ECN and now referred to as a dark pool, enabling trading clients to trade with each other directly and anonymously via the Internet on its electronic trading platform. As of May 31, 2008, its notes that its community was comprised of 514 members globally that collectively accounted for an estimated $15.9 trillion in equity assets under management, or an average of $30.9 billion per member. In 2007, its average trade size in the U.S. was 51,580 shares.
In 2007 revenues were $346.45 million, up from $252.679 million in 2006; and the annual earnings attributed to each year were $97.51 million in 2007 and $80.5 million in 2006. The company also noted growth in Q1 2008 over Q1 2007 with revenues and earnings of $107.07 million and $25.72 million in Q1 2008 and $77.347 million and $23.159 million in Q1 2007.
Jon C. Ogg
July 2, 2008
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