About one year after emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, cable overbuilder Knology Inc. is testing the public markets, filing a prospectus for an initial public offering of stock that it hopes will raise about $86 million.
Knology’s would be the first IPO of a cable operator since Mediacom Communications Corp. raised $380 million in its IPO in 2000.
Knology -- which plans to have its stock listed on the NASDAQ Exchange under the symbol "KNOL" -- did not disclose in the prospectus how many shares it expects to offer the public nor at which price. No official date has been set for the IPO yet.
Underwriters for the offering are UBS Investment Bank, Raymond James Financial Inc., Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc. and Morgan Keegan Inc.
Knology, which has about 132,000 subscribers in five states, said in the document that it expected the net proceeds of the offering to be about $68 million -- $15 million of which would be used to finance its acquisition of cable systems in Pinellas County, Fla., and Cerritos, Calif., with 57,000 customers from Verizon Communications unit Verizon New Media Ventures. That deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
The rest of the money -- about $53 million -- would be used to fund upgrades of its cable properties.
