RailAmerica Comes Public, Again (RA, FIG)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Private equity firms keep exiting their old buyouts when they can.  This morning we have an initial public offering from RailAmerica, Inc. (NYSE: RA) for some 22,000,000 shares of common stock.  This is being brought public by Fortress Investment Group LLC (NYSE: FIG).  This deal is listed as a 10,500,000 primary shares of common stock being sold, as well as 11,500,000 secondary shares of common stock by the RR Acquisition Holding LLC wholly-owned entity under private equity funds managed by an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group LLC.

RailAmerica’s $15.00 price is at the lower-end of its $15 to $16 indicated price range.  This buyout was announced back in 2006 and closed in 2007.  This one used to trade under the ticker “RRA” on the NYSE.

J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley were the listed underwriters in the deal.  These underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 1,575,000 additional shares of common stock (and RR Acquisition Holding LLC granted the underwriters the option to purchase up to 1,725,000 additional shares) to cover any overallotments.

Fortress funds acquired the company in February 2007 and will continue to own approximately 55.8% of RailAmerica after the closing of the offering.

Fortress is down almost 2% at $5.45 and RailAmerica has not yet opened.

JON C. OGG
OCTOBER 13, 2009

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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