Qimonda Goes Public in the U.S.

by Anton Shilov
07/21/2006 | 11:57 PM

Infineon Technologies AG and Qimonda AG announced Friday that Qimonda, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infineon, has filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a proposed initial public offering of Qimonda’s shares. The announcement is inline with Infineon’s strategy to withdraw from the market of memory.

Qimonda and Infineon plan to offer 63 million of shares, each priced between $16 and $18, which represents the offer size between $1 and $1.1 billion. Of the 63 million shares, 21 million (approximately 33%) will be offered for sale by Infineon and 42 million shares will come from a capital increase (approximately 67%) by Qimonda, which hopes to get between $672 million and $756 million to invest into its manufacturing facilities as well as research and development.

An over-allotment option of up to 9.45 million additional shares (about 15% of all) will also be available from Infineon. Assuming completion of the offering and a full exercise of the over-allotment option, Qimonda’s free float will be approximately 21%, which means that the company’s market capitalization will be about $4.8 – $5.4 billion.

The Qimonda ADRs will be offered to institutional and retail investors in the and to institutional investors outside the USA. The ticker symbol for Qimonda on the New York Stock Exchange will be QI.

Earlier it was reported that Needham & Co. said in a research note that Micron would buy Infineon’s U.S. memory assets and Nanya, Taiwan’s second-largest memory chip maker, would buy its non-U.S. memory assets, including Infineon’s flagship plant in the German city of Dresden. The assumption does not find evidences in present IPO, however, both companies still may acquire stakes in Qimonda.

Credit Suisse, Citigroup and JPMorgan will act as joint book-running managers for the offering. Co-lead managers of the transaction are ABN Amro Rothschild, Deutsche Bank Securities and Hypovereinsbank.