When asked by an analyst “Do you have a good sense for where morale is today?” among employees at VMware, its new chief executive, Paul Maritz, said the proposed option exchange “went a long way to addressing concern there.”
The question came up as part of the regular conference call the company conducted after releasing earnings Tuesday (which the filing incorrectly said took place Read the rest of this entry »
Remember back in August 2007, when VMware staged the most impressive initial public offering of a technology company since Google? The planned offering price for the 33 million shares it sold to the public for the first time was first estimated to be between $23 and $25, a range that was later raised to between $27 and $29. The shares finally went out at the top of the second range, and ended their first day at $51, up 76 percent.
In anticipation of the public offering, VMware directors authorized broad-based grants of options to employees totaling more than 35.6 million shares of stock with a price of $23.
Shares of VMware, which makes software to enhance the computing power and flexibility of servers, while controlling costs and energy consumption, soared to as high as $125 within less than three months of its debut. It was the best performing local IPO last year in the best year for initial offerings since 2000, the year the dot.com bubble burst.
That was then and this is now. Read the rest of this entry »
After spending $7.8 billion in fiscal 2007 buying back 297 million shares of its own stock, Cisco Systems is asking shareholders to approve more than doubling the number of shares left in its current stock incentive plan to 394 million, according to its proxy filed Wednesday.
Two years ago Cisco asked its shareholders to approve a stock incentive plan covering 350 million shares, which, along with shares left over from a previous plan, gave it a bank of 567 million shares with which to reward its workforce.
Since then the company has doled out to employees a net total of 413 million shares by way of option grants and other stock awards. The 154 million shares they have left in the plan won’t cover the estimated 185 million shares Cisco will give out in its current fiscal year, so its asking shareholders to approve adding 209 million more.
And although the company is asking its shareholders to extend the plan through fiscal 2012, it says that the new batch of stock will only last through 2009, after which it will need to seek more.
Phronesis Partners, an Ohio-based hedge fund that takes its name from a Greek term used by the philosopher Aristotle to denote “”practical wisdom,” or “”prudence,” disclosed Tuesday in an SEC filing that it is now the largest owner of of a company that has yet to show a profit and has accumulated losses to the tune of $218 million since its founding in 1993.
BioForm, the San Mateo provider of “injectable dermal filler,” was the second local “medical aesthetics” company in the last week to register plans to sell its shares to the public. (Last Thursday Reliant Technologies of Mountain View, a maker of laser-based “skin-rejuvenation” systems, estimated that it would raise $95 million in its initial public offering.)
Like Reliant, BioForm has yet to turn a profit but its sales doubled in fiscal 2007 to $47.4 million, which coincidentally is almost equal to its accumulated losses through June 30.
The company says it had about $17.6 in cash on hand as of the end of June and burned through about $12.4 in fiscal 2007.
Another Silicon Valley company filed plans to go public with the SEC Thursday. Reliant
Technologies of Mountain View, a medical device company making laser-based “skin-rejuvenation” systems, estimated that it would raise $95 million in its initial public
offering.
Since launching its first laser system in 2004, the company says sales have grown from $4.5 million in 2004 to $57.5 million in 2006, and to $35.3 million for the first six months of 2007. Unlike recent valley IPO wunderkind, VMware, Reliant has yet to show a profit and has accumulated $55.6 million in losses through June 30.
It’s no start-up, however, having begun life in California in 1990 as Reliant Laser. It
changed to its current name in 1993, was purchased in 2001 by a Nevada corporation, and then became its own wholly-owned subsidiary as part of a recapitalization and equity financing to form the present corporation.
It buffed up its Silicon Valley connections in the last year hiring former Lexar Media head Eric Stang to be its chief executive in October, and former Corcept Therapeutics chief financial officer, Andrew Galligan, as its own CFO last month.
Several ex-Coherent executives are also involved, including chairman Hank Gauthier and chief technology officer Leonard C. DeBenedictis.
No word at this early stage on what the company will price its shares at. CEO Stang was
granted options to buy nearly 1.5 million shares of the company’s stock for $6 each when he was hired. The prospectus leaves room for information on sales by insiders in the IPO but no details have been filled in.
Stay tuned.
Some might say that EMC sold its VMware software division cheap Tuesday. The 33 million shares it offered to the public for the first time at $29 each, ended the day at $51, up 76 percent, meaning that some $726 million was left on the table for others to feast on.
That spare change would have been more than enough to reimburse EMC what it paid for the Palo Alto software company in January 2004 … about $625 million.
In fact, VMware borrowed $800 million from its parent back in April so it could make a dividend payment to EMC to help it “realize the increased value of its investment in us from the time of our acquisition by EMC.”
More than half of the net proceeds from VMware’s IPO will go to paying back $350 million of that debt, and to buy the $127 million new corporate headquarters that EMC built for the company on Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto.
EMC still owns roughly 87 percent of VMware, worth about $16.6 billion at the end of the stock’s first day of trading. Oh, and by the way, EMC shares closed down 3.7 percent Tuesday, and it ended the day worth $38.5 billion, about $1.5 billion less than the day before.
You win some, you lose some.
A.P. Pharma, of Redwood City, dislosed that it raised $37.5 million back in June through private placement of stock. That should give it time to complete trials of a drug for ”the prevention of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting.”
The extra dough will also apparently be enough to keep the pharmaceutical company from being delisted by Nasdaq.
Subscribe via RSS all feeds