Carlyle IPO watch: To attract large investors, Carlyle IPO priced at $22 per share on Wednesday, below the bottom of the previously set initial public offering price range of $23-$25 per share. The Carlyle IPO totally sold 30.5 million, $671 million worth common shares. The company formally listed its common shares on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “CG” on Tursday.
Carlyle Group is one of the world’s largest private equity investment companies operating approximately $147 billion in assets including 89 active funds and 52 FOFs. JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Credit Suisse investment bank jointly acted as the lead underwriters for the Carlyle IPO and the underwriter syndicate also included Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Barclays.
As early as in 2007, there came out the news that Carlyle Group would go public, and the company postponed its IPO plan as the outbreak of the global financial crisis. In September 2011, Carlyle Group submitted to the IPO registration statement wo the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but due to the market volatilities, Carlyle IPO has been postponed until today. According to the regulatory filing, Carlyle Group will primarily use the proceeds collected in the public offering to repay debt and other company working capitals, including mergers and acquisitions, and strategic investments.
Although the PE industry is still optimistic about the future prospects for the industry, but the market investors seems to have become accustomed to their “making money in low key” images, and the market investors did not seem to appreciate the high sounding Carlyle IPO.
As a matter of fact, the bleak situation of the Carlyle IPO was not surprising, several large private equity companies have gone through the similar experiences. The pioneer Blackstone Group went public in 2007 with an actual IPO price less than the half of the previously estimated IPO price. The 2011 listed Apollo is also bleak, so far the Apollo’s stock price has dropped 34%; Oaktree Capital which was listed three weeks ago, raised funds of approximately of $387 million, 25% less than the estimated financing amount, and Oaktree Capital’s stock price reached only the bottom of the expected range and has dropped accumulatively 6%.