NEW YORK-Palmer Wireless Inc., a cellular carrier based in Fort Myers, Fla., sold an add-on offering June 12 of five million shares of Class A common stock at $20 per share. The company’s stock, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol PWIR, closed Wednesday at $20.50 per share.
Palmer Wireless, which went public in March 1995, will use proceeds of the new stock offering toward repaying a bank credit facility that had an outstanding balance of $345 million as of this March.
The company then plans to borrow $66.5 million from the revolving credit facility to purchase two other cellular markets: the Georgia RSA 6 from Horizon Cellular of Griffin, Ga., and Georgia RSA 1 from United States Cellular Corp. in Knoxville, Tenn.
Palmer Wireless had 227,400 subscribers in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina in an area covering a population of 3.3 million, as of the end of March. The two new acquisitions would increase its subscriber base by 6,222 and add two rural service areas with a total population of 400,000.
Goldman, Sachs & Co., New York, was lead underwriter of the deal.
