NEW YORK-American Portable Telecom Inc., the fifth largest licensee of personal communications services in the United States, registered Feb. 20 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell publicly its first 11 million shares of common stock. Depending on SEC review, a process that can take up to six weeks, the issue could come to market sometime in the spring.
“The success of Omnipoint and InterCel in the public markets played a key role in our decision to register,” said Karen M. Stewart, vice president of investor relations for Telephone and Data Systems Inc., Chicago, APT’s parent company. “Apparently, the market liked our announcement because our stock was up 3 and 1/8 at the close of the day.”
PCS licensee Omnipoint Corp. was the first PCS provider to tap the public capital markets with its IPO in January, while PCS licensee InterCel Inc. completed an offering earlier this month, raising $115 million.
APT, a wholly owned subsidiary of TDS, estimates that the initial public offering price will be between $15 and $18 per share. APT will issue and sell all of the shares of the IPO. TDS will own between 82 percent and 84 percent of APT’s capital stock once the offering is completed, depending on whether the underwriters exercise an over-allotment option of 1.65 million additional common stock shares. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Corp. is lead manager of the underwriting syndicate.
Part of the net proceeds will repay about $60 million in debt APT owes TDS, a telecommunications company that has cellular, paging and local telephone operations.
APT, also based in Chicago, plans to use the rest of the net proceeds of its IPO to help pay for construction, development and operating costs to establish its PCS networks. The company paid nearly $289 million for licenses in the Minneapolis, Tampa-St. Petersburg-Orlando, Fla., Pittsburgh, Pa., Kansas City, Mo. and Columbus, Ohio, major trading areas.
The company plans to construct networks using Global System for Mobile communications technology for its PCS markets, which has a total of about 27.3 million pops.
