New IPOs: Graham Packaging; Quattrone's QuinStreet
Graham and its backers, led by Blackstone Group and the Graham family, hope to raise as much as $429M in an IPO tomorrow
Graham Packaging Corp., the York company that helped fund the Wayne-based Graham family investment firms when heir Donald C. Graham and his siblings sold a stake to Blackstone Group in the late 1990s, hopes to raise up to $429 million tomorrow by selling up to 26.8 million shares at around $15 each in an initial public stock offering. Blackstone, the Grahams and other insiders would share in the proceeds, some of which would also be used to pay down the company's debt.
Graham says it earned $61 million in the first nine months of last year, after losing money in each of the three previous years, on sales of around $2.5 billion. Besides major plants in York and Hazleton, Graham has bought or built plants in Levittown, Bordentown, and more than 80 other U.S. and foreign towns. Major clients include PepsiCo and its subsidiaries, and Procter & Gamble, among others. Underwriters are led by Citi, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. Read Graham's latest offering statement to the SEC here.
For more on Graham and other pending deals, see Bloomberg story here.
The article also lays out the latest initial public offering by former Internet banker Frank Quattrone, who's trying to take Internet advertiser QuinStreet Inc. public. Quattrone, native of South Philly's Stella Maris parish and a graduate of St. Joe's Prep before he made his fortune out on the left coast, is a brilliant tech student and a natural salesman; as WSJ reporter Randall Smith's recent bio, The Prince of Silicon Valley, points out, Quattrone's used those gifts in the service of what turned out to be some real turkey companies during the Internet bubble.