By Lee Spears - Jul 4, 2012 5:26 AM GMT+0700
Manchester United Ltd., the English soccer team with a record 19 national championships, filed to raise $100 million in a U.S. initial public offering.
The club didn’t say how many shares it will offer or at what price in a filing yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The offering amount is a placeholder used to calculate registration fees and may change.
United announced its plans for the sale a week after the end of a monthlong drought in U.S. IPOs. The club, owned by the Glazer family, scrapped plans for a Singapore offering as volatile stock markets roiled equity sales, people familiar said at the time. Proceeds from the sale will be used to repay debt, the filing shows.
“The U.S. market has an ability to provide cash,” said Michael Cuggino, who manages about $17 billion at San Francisco- based Pacific Heights Asset Management. “They’re Premier League soccer, so there’s an enterprise value there.”
United, which previously planned to raise as much as $1 billion in Singapore, may hold the U.S. offering this summer, people with knowledge of the plans said last month. Singapore’s benchmark stock index, the Straits Times Index, has fallen about 8 percent since Aug. 1, when United was contemplating an IPO in the city state.
Jefferies Group Inc., Credit Suisse Group AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co. will lead the offering, United’s filing shows. Morgan Stanley, which had been hired to lead the sale in Singapore, isn’t listed as an underwriter in the filing for the U.S. offering.
U.S. Pitch
Banks pitched the idea of a U.S. sale to the Glazer family, the club’s U.S. owners, one person said, who bought United in 2005 for 790 million pounds ($1.24 billion) and also own the National Football League’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
United, whose players include England’s striker Wayne Rooney and Welshman Ryan Giggs, has 659 million followers, making it the world’s most popular club, United said in May, citing a study by market research company Kantar. Its supporters have doubled in five years, helped by 108 million fans in China, where the team plans to play two exhibition matches this summer.
The dry spell in U.S. IPOs ended last week with initial offerings by companies including ServiceNow Inc. (NOW) and EQT Midstream Partners LP, both of which have gained value in public trading.
Kayak Software Corp. and Palo Alto Networks Inc. plan to begin marketing IPOs to investors next week and complete the sales by the end of this month, people with knowledge of the companies’ plans said yesterday.
To contact the reporter on this story: Lee Spears in New York at lspears3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeffrey McCracken at jmccracken3@bloomberg.net
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