Although it doesn’t come as much of a surprise, telecommunications service developer Avaya has files to offer a $1 billion initial public offering, saying it primarily wants to use the money raised by the stock offering to pay down “certain long-term indebtedness.” The company has not announced when the common stock would be offered to the public, or announce a target share price.
Some of that debt like stems from the company’s $900 million acquisition of components of Nortel Networks’ businesses: Nortel filed for bankruptcy in early 2009 and Avaya was one of the companies that picked up pieces of Nortel’s assets at the ensuing fire sale. Avay outbid Siemens AG to take on Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions, Government Solutions, and Diamondware business units. Other companies also picked up interesting assets from Nortel: Microsoft paid top dollar for a large block of IPv4 Internet addresses, and Google set out $900 million to pick up a broad swath of Nortel patents—the deal was just approved last month.
Avaya’s primarily competitor for telephony solutions has traditionally been Cisco—in the last few years the companies have been jostling back and forth for first place in the market. However, while Avaya’s unit sales have remained strong the company’s sales revenue has remained relatively flat, and the IPO values the company at about $5 billion—which is about 40 percent less than the $8.2 billion TGP and Silver Lake Partners sunk into the company when they took it private back in 2007.
