IPO Pricing: AeroVironment

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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AeroVironment Inc.(AVAV-NASDAQ) has priced its IPO.  This was one that we thought was supposed to price later in the week, but the demand was there for a premium pricing or the late-week indication was not accurate.  We had been given a Wednesday to Thursday IPO trade date indication last week; but the Cramer push on CNBC’s Mad Money from last friday might have bumped the terms a bit more.

AeroVironment is a maker of small unmanned backpack-sized recon-aircraft used by the military, although it does derive some corporate revenues; more can be found on the company homepage.  The deal priced 6.7 million shares at $17.00 per share, above the $14.00 to $16.00 range.  The underwriters have the option to purchase an additional 1 million shares to cover overallotments and it will have slightly north of a $350 million market cap for the offering price.

As noted, Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter; co-managers are listed as Friedman Billings Ramsay, Jefferies, Raymond James, Thomas Weisel, and Stifel Nicolaus.  The company had revenues of $139 million and profit of approximately $11 million in 2006. This was expected to get a slight bump at pricing, but Cramer got on this one last Friday and now many more inquiries have been made and the opening price could easily be above $19.00 or $20.00.  We’ll have to see how the market is on Tuesday before hanging any finite opening price out there.

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Jon C. Ogg
January 22, 2007

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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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