IPO Filing: Cross Match Technologies (CROS)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Cross Match Technologies Inc. has filed to come public via an IPO, although no terms and conditions have been set.  The company lists Credit Suisse as the lead underwriter and lists co-managers are UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Raymond James. 

Cross Match provides biometric reading technologies for systems integrators, governments, law enforcement agencies and businesses around the world.  Its products are mostly in identity management systems: fingerprint, palm and full-hand scanning devices, Livescan devices, document readers.  It also has proprietary software, such as criminal booking, civil identification and facial recognition applications.  CM’s total revenue has grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33% from 2002 to 2006. For 2006, total revenue was $76.9 million; and has more than 80,000 products deployed to more than 5,000 customers in 75 countries.

Normally we’d be able to say this is a backdoor play opportunity, but it doesn’t look that way for 95% of US investors.  The company is 37.94% owned by Smiths Group plc in the United Kingdom.  Unfortunately, even then the size differentiators between Smiths and Cross Match may be too large to ignore.  Cross Match has the proposed ticker of "CROS" on NASDAQ.

Jon C. Ogg
April 30, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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.

Featured Reads

Our top personal finance-related articles today. Your wallet will thank you later.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618