Zillow with a Z will break NYSE grip on one-letter

Zillow Inc. wants to end the New York Stock Exchange’s monopoly on companies trading under a single letter. Zillow, a real-estate website that filed last month to raise as much as $51.8 million by going public, disclosed this week that it applied for a Nasdaq Stock Market listing under the ticker Z.

Assuming the application is approved, Zillow would be the first Nasdaq stock with a one-letter symbol. “They’re doing it to attract attention, obviously,” said Bob Stovall, a managing director and global strategist at Wood Asset Management Inc. who has worked on Wall Street since 1953. “I wouldn’t even notice it or look it up,” he said, if Zillow used the traditional four letters for a symbol.

 Nasdaq-listed companies have been able to trade under a single letter since July 2007, when the Securities and Exchange Commission changed the regulations that governed ticker symbols. Before then, stocks could only have one to three letters on the NYSE or the former American Stock Exchange, now NYSE Amex. Another company preparing for an initial public offering, Pandora Media Inc., plans to list its shares on the NYSE under the letter P. The Internet-music service would become the first company to use that ticker since September 2002, when Phillips Petroleum Co. combined with Conoco Inc. to form ConocoPhillips.

Only Five Left
The Z ticker has been available since March 2003, when Foot Locker Inc. adopted FL as its symbol. Z had previously been used by Foot Locker and three predecessor companies -- Venator Group Inc., Woolworth Corp. and F.W. Woolworth Co. -- since 1925. “We couldn’t be more excited” about Zillow’s plan to adopt the letter, said Robert H. McCooey Jr., senior vice president of new listings and capital markets at Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. in New York.

Using Z “will allow them to brand themselves well.” A Zillow spokeswoman, Charlynn Duecy, declined to comment on the decision. The Seattle-based company provides property- value estimates and displays real-estate listings on its site. Rich Adamonis, an NYSE Euronext spokesman, declined to comment as well. Zillow has yet to determine the price or number of shares for its IPO. Neither has Pandora, based in Oakland, California, which plans to go public with a $100 million stock sale. After the two companies complete their IPOs, only five letters will be available for ticker symbols: I, J, Q, U and W. I has been available since First Interstate Bancorp was bought by Wells Fargo & Co. in 1996. J, U and W have gone unused since 2002. Q opened up last month after CenturyLink Inc. completed a takeover of Qwest Communications International Inc., the only company ever to use that letter for its ticker.

Following Hyatt
The most recent company to adopt a single-letter symbol was Hyatt Hotels Corp., which began trading under the ticker H after its IPO in November 2009. Chicago-based Hyatt succeeded Realogy Corp., which was taken private by Apollo Management LP in an April 2007 buyout. NYSE companies have been able to select tickers with four letters since the SEC’s rules changed. LinkedIn Corp., the first social-media company to go public in the U.S., took advantage of this provision. Shares of the Mountain View, California-based company started trading under the symbol LNKD last week.

Russian search engine Yandex makes its Nasdaq debut in New York

SHARES of Yandex, an internet search engine barely known outside Russia, rose more than 55 per cent on Tuesday, in the latest multibillion-dollar technology offering.

The debut of Yandex on the Nasdaq market defied expectations, coming on the heels of LinkedIn, the professional networking site whose shares more than doubled on their first day of trading.

The Russian company raised $US1.3 billion ($1.24 billion), the largest internet offering in the US since Google went public in 2004. The stock closed at $US38.84 on Tuesday, up from $US25 at its float.
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''Yandex serves as yet another data point that we are at the start of a growth cycle for IPOs,'' said Paul Bard, the director of research at Renaissance Capital. ''Investors have been starved for innovative, rapidly-growing enterprises in new industries.''

But the strong demand for technology offerings is fanning concerns about market froth. In recent weeks, a number of companies have enjoyed robust first-day debuts, drawing unfavourable comparisons to the dotcom boom of the 1990s.

Renren, the Facebook of China, jumped 29 per cent after its float earlier this month. LinkedIn, which had traded in secondary markets at an implied valuation of $US2.5 billion, is now worth more than $US8 billion.
As befitting a technology startup, Yandex had scrappy beginnings. A Russian mathematician, Arkady Volozh, and geophysicist, Ilya Segalovich, founded the company in 1997, using an algorithm they invented to scan the Cyrillic script of the Russian Bible and literature.

The Yandex offering underscores the appeal of companies with a strong claim to a rapidly-expanding sector - internet advertising - in emerging economies that are projected to grow more swiftly than those of the US and Europe.

The Russian internet market is the second-largest in Europe, after Germany's, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group. The report estimated online commerce in the country will increase to 3.7 per cent of the gross domestic product by 2015 from 1.9 per cent in 2009, as broadband makes its way into the Russian provinces.
Yandex, which caters to the world's roughly 270 million Russian speakers, generates more searches in Russia than Google. It is also profitable, earning a net income of $US134.3 million on revenue of $US439.7 million last year.

''This is the Google of Russia,'' said Scott Sweet, a senior managing partner at IPO Boutique. ''They are profitable, their growth is outstanding and they have over 60 per cent market share.''

Still, the company faces significant political risk, as Yandex indicated in a regulatory filing. While the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has often expressed a desire to expand online commerce as an outlet for the country's rich scientific legacy, tight government control of political news could intensify as internet use expands.

Just last month, a deputy director of the Federal Security Services, the successor agency to the KGB, said authorities were studying whether to ban sites such as Skype or Google's Gmail that use encryption inaccessible to Russian law enforcement agencies.
Yandex's founders originally planned an offering in 2008 but delayed it after the onset of the global recession.
During that time, they negotiated the sale of a symbolic stake to a Russian state-controlled bank, Sberbank, in an indication of the political risks of rising internet use in Russia. Other co-owners of Yandex today include Tiger Global, a US investment firm; Baring Vostok, a Russian-focused fund; and the World Bank's International Finance Corp.

''This is a demarcation point,'' for Russian internet businesses, said Peter Loukianoff, a co-founder of Almaz Capital Partners, a venture capital firm and an early investor in Yandex. The listing, he said, signalled a new phase of ''intellectual wealth creation in Russia'', a country where most billionaires made their money on the privatisation of oil fields and mines.

Yandex follows the $US912 million offering last year of Mail.ru, a Russian internet conglomerate that owns a minority stake in Facebook.

Biggest First-Day Drops

Company Name	Offer Price	Close Price (First Day)	Percent Change
AcelRx Pharmaceuticals, Inc.	$5.00	$4.55	-9%
Tornier N.V.	$19.00	$18.05	-5%
Trunkbow International Holdings Limited	$5.00	$4.74	-5%
Kips Bay Medical, Inc.	$8.00	$7.93	-1%
Summit Hotel Properties, Inc.	$9.75	$9.69	-1%
Pacira Pharmaceuticals, Inc.	$7.00	$7.02	0%
MagnaChip Semiconductor Corporation	$14.00	$14.01	0%
BCD Semiconductor Manufacturing Limited	$10.50	$10.50	0%
Imperial Holdings, Inc.	$10.75	$10.81	1%
Zuoan Fashion Limited	$7.00	$7.04	1%

Biggest First-Day Gains

Company Name	Offer Price	Close Price (First Day)	Percent Change
Qihoo 360 Technology Co. td.	$14.50	$34.00	134%
Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc.	$13.00	$19.07	47%
Epocrates, Inc.	$16.00	$21.96	37%
Demand Media, Inc.	$17.00	$22.65	33%
Endocyte, Inc.	$6.00	$7.73	29%
ServiceSource International, Inc.	$10.00	$12.18	22%
NeoPhotonics Corporation	$11.00	$13.25	20%
BG Medicine, Inc.	$7.00	$8.05	15%
Gevo, Inc.	$15.00	$16.44	10%
Nielsen Holdings B.V.	$23.00	$25.00	9%

Freescale Semiconductor launches IPO, misses $1B target

Austin-based chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor Inc. went public on Wednesday but fell short of company expectations, pricing stock 22% less than projected at $18 a share.

According to an initial public offering filing (IPO), Freescale wanted to raise more than $1 billion, which is around $22 to $24 a share but instead will settle on making approximately $782 million after the sale of 43.5 million shares, excluding an underwriters’ option to purchase as many as 6.5 million shares.

Freescale stated that proceeds from the sale will almost exclusively be used to pay off some of its $7.6 billion in debt. The company has shares available on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under FSL and opened to the public today on a positive note at $19 a share.

This is the second time Freescale has gone public. The firm offered up shares in 2004, after breaking with Motorola Inc., and raised $1.6 billion from that IPO. In 2006, it was bought out for $17.6 billion, or about $36.12 per share after a private buyout by the Blackstone Group, the Carlyle Group, Permira Advisors, and TPG Capital.

One major bonus of reducing debt is that  interest expense will also go down by about $60 million a year. Freescale paid approximately $583 million in interest in 2010. The firm had around $4.5 billion in sales last year.

Freescale has about 5,000 employees in Austin and close to 19,000 total worldwide.

Lone Pine Resources (LPR) shares fall in NYSE debut

Lone Pine Resources is an independent oil and gas exploration, development, and production company with operations in Canada within the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec and the Northwest Territories.

It was incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware on September 30, 2010 and, until the completion of our initial public offering on June 1, 2011, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Forest Oil Corporation.

• Shares close at $12.54 vs $13 IPO price
• 15 mln shares sold in IPO, priced below $18-$20 range
• Trading on NYSE under the symbol LPR
• JPMorgan, Credit Suisse, TD Securities led underwriters 

NEW YORK, May 26 (Reuters) - The shares of oil and natural gas company Lone Pine Resources Inc (LPR.N) fell in their stock market debut on Thursday after the IPO priced below the expected range.

The shares closed at $12.54 on the New York Stock Exchange, 3.5 percent below their $13 IPO price.

The company, owned by Forest Oil Corp (FST.N) and with operations in Canada, sold 15 million shares at $13 each in the IPO, well below the expected price range of $18 to $20.

After the IPO, Forest Oil owned 82.3 percent of Lone Pine's common stock, which it intends to distribute to its shareholders within about four months.

Lone Pine will use the IPO proceeds, along with borrowings under its credit facility, to repay debt owed to Forest Oil.

Lone Pine had 376 billion cubic feet equivalent of estimated proved reserves as of Dec. 31, 2010. About 71 percent of that was natural gas.

Lone Pine trades under the symbol "LPR" on the New York Stock Exchange.

JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and TD Securities led the underwriters for the IPO.

LinkedIn IPO raises more than $4 billion

Largest tech offering since Google; shares begin trading on NYSE Thursday 
Investors keen to get in on the online networking craze snapped up LinkedIn Corp.'s IPO at $45 per share late Wednesday, hitting the top end of the projected price range. It minted LinkedIn with a market value of more than $4 billion, the highest for a U.S. Internet company taking its first bow on Wall Street since Google Inc. went public nearly seven years ago.

LinkedIn Corp.'s shares will make their market debut Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange. Mutual funds, pension funds and other major money managers got the first chance to buy most of the IPO's 7.84 million shares because stock in these offerings is typically sold to investment bankers' top customers. That means Main Street investors will get their first chance at LinkedIn on Thursday. Most analysts believe that demand will send shares higher in their first day of trading even though the IPO price already is well above LinkedIn's initial target of $32 to $35 per share.

The lofty $4.3 billion appraisal of LinkedIn reflects investors' belief that Internet services that connect people with common interests will be able to make more money as the Web's audience steadily expands. LinkedIn's valuation eventually may look modest compared to other Internet companies that are being touted as potentially going public in the next 18 months. The short list includes: online messaging service Twitter, Web game maker Zynga, coupon site Groupon and Facebook, the social network that boasts more than 500 million users.

LinkedIn, based down the street from Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, runs a website that serves as part-Rolodex, part-hiring center for workers trying to meet people who might further their careers and businesses searching for talented employees. More than 102 million people have set up LinkedIn profiles so far. Another million join each week.

The company makes most of its money from fees charged for better access to the data on its website. It earned $3.4 million on revenue of $243 million last year, but expects to lose money this year as it invests in new products and more computers to run its services.

LinkedIn's initial public offering of stock raised a total of $353 million. The company's take works out to $217 million, before investment banking fees and other expenses. The remaining $136 million was divided among 87 stockholders who sold a total of 3 million shares in the IPO.

The biggest windfalls went to: Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which will get $39 million from the sale of 871,840 shares; Bain Capital Venture, which will get $29 million from the sale of 653,880 shares; the McGraw-Hill Cos., which will get $20 million from the sale of 435,920 shares; and Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's co-founder and executive chairman, who made $5 million on the sale of 115,335 shares. Hoffman retains a 20 percent stake now worth $853 million.

Now a venture capitalist, Hoffman, 43, also was among the early investors in Facebook, which has said it might file IPO papers before May 2012.

LinkedIn's CEO is Jeff Weiner, a former Yahoo Inc. executive who has been running the professional networking company for the past two years. The company's stock will trade under the ticker "LNKD."

LinkedIn sees IPO pricing up by 30 percent to More than $405 Million

LinkedIn, which is set for an initial public offering on Thursday, is now on track to raise $405.7 million — up from an estimated $274.4 million earlier this month, according to a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

With investor demand surging for social media companies, LinkedIn, which has more than 100 million members in over 200 counties, said it plans to sell more than 9 million shares at $42 to $45 each.

Its current I.P.O. plans represent a 30 percent-plus increase from previous expectations. In early May, the professional networking site said in a regulatory filing that it planned to sell 7.8 million shares at $32 to $35 a piece.

LinkedIn is the latest in a flurry of Internet companies rushing to go public, amid strong investor appetite and improved market conditions. And social networking sites are among the most highly anticipated, with LinkedIn set to be one of the first major players in the United States to go public this year. At the top end of the range, the company is currently valued at roughly $4.3 billion, compared with more than $3 billion based on earlier pricing.

Other giants in the space are expected to follow with blockbuster offerings. Groupon, the social shopping site, is said to be considering an I.P.O. for later this year. Facebook, by far the largest social networking sites, could see a market debut in 2012.

An I.P.O. offers entrepreneurs and institutional investors a chance to cash out. LinkedIn’s chairman, Reid Hoffman, who is selling a small number of shares, will net an estimated $5.2 million, assuming the shares price at $45. His entire stake is $852.8 million. Goldman Sachs is the largest seller in the I.P.O., offering 871,840, the firm’s entire stake.

But it remains to be seen how well the stocks will perform in the public markets. The Chinese social networking site Renren priced its offering on the New York Stock Exchange at $14. While its shares closed at $18 on the first day of trading on May 4, the stock is currently trading at $12.60.

Enduro Royalty files for a $350 mln IPO

Enduro Royalty Trust — through its sponsor, Enduro Resource Partners LLC — has filed for an initial public offering of 13.2 million trust units with an expected initial price range of $24 to $26 per unit, which would raise $316.8 million to $343.2 million.

Enduro Resource Partners is a privately held company engaged in producing and developing oil and natural gas properties in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico.


Austin, Texas-based Enduro engages in the production and development of oil and natural gas from properties located in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico.



Enduro Royalty Trust is a Delaware trust formed in 2011 that owns royalty interests in oil and gas production properties in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. The trust is entitled to receive 80% of net profits from the sale of oil and natural gas produced by privately-held Enduro Sponsor at properties in the Permian Basin and in the East Texas/North Louisiana regions; it then makes monthly distributions to trust unitholders. Enduro Sponsor holds interests in more than 900 net producing wells that are operated by third-party oil and gas companies. Its properties have proved reserves of about 27 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Royalty trusts pays out dividends based on selling a fixed share of production of the sponsoring company.

The underlying producing regions for the trust include the Permian Basin in west Texas and New Mexico, and properties in east Texas/northern Louisiana, according to its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As of Dec. 31, substantially all of the total proved reserves relating to the underlying properties were operated by third party oil and natural gas companies.

Enduro sponsor's oil and natural gas properties in the East Texas/North Louisiana region were acquired from Denbury Resources Inc. (DNR) in December. Its oil and natural gas properties in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico were acquired from Samson Investment Co. and ConocoPhillips (COP) in January and February, respectively.

About 47% of the operating area's proved reserves of 27.1 million barrels of oil equivalent were oil as of the end of last year.

For 2010, the predecessor underlying properties reported excess of revenue over direct operating expenses fell 2.1% to $15.1 million as revenue declined 7.2% to $22.4 million, more than offsetting at 16% drop in operating expense.


The filing did not reveal how many units the company planned to sell or their expected price, but said Enduro will use the proceeds to repay debt.

Barclays Capital will be the underwriter, the company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.


Lead Managers

• Barclays Capital
• Citi
• Goldman, Sachs & Co.

It intends to list its units on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "NDRO."

About Enduro Royalty Trust

Enduro Royalty Trust is a Delaware statutory trust formed by Enduro Resource Partners to own a net profits interest representing the right to receive 80% of the net profits from the sale of oil and natural gas production from certain of Enduro Resource Partners’ properties in the States of Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico.

About Enduro Resource Partners LLC

Enduro Resource Partners is a privately-held company engaged in the production and development of oil and natural gas properties located in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico.