NEW YORK-After significantly reducing the size and price of its offering, ICO Global Communications Ltd., London, went public July 31, selling 10 million common stock shares at $12 each.
Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Corp., New York, lead managed the initial public offering, which had been planned at 20 million shares for $16 to $19 each.
Prior to the IPO, the medium-earth-orbit mobile satellite system company had raised $2 billion in private equity from 60 strategic investors, the largest of which is Inmarsat. ICO expects to launch the first of 12 satellites of its $4.6 billion system in December and to offer voice and data services commercially by 2000.
However, it still is lining up regulatory approvals from some of the countries in which it plans to do business, notably the United States, where there are more contenders than available 2GHz spectrum. The European Commission opposes federal budget requirements for auctioning this spectrum as being in violation of World Trade Organization market access requirements.
Other uncertainties relate to who must pay to relocate broadcast auxiliary and terrestrial microwave services incumbents from this portion of the spectrum if spectrum sharing isn’t feasible, ICO’s preliminary prospectus said.
ICO said it believes its technology is superior to that of competing global MSS providers with respect to call reliability, seamless global coverage and flexibility to develop new services.
The company plans to offer single-mode and multimode handsets, the latter affording end users access both to its system and land-based wireless telephone networks using various technologies. However, ICO also said the Bosch-Audiovox World Phone, the GlobalRoam offering by GTE Wireless and T-Mobil and Iridium’s planned ICRS global terrestrial roaming service “will compete directly with [some services] ICO intends to offer.”
