Active Network Ready to Pull IPO Trigger

[Corrected 5/20/09, 5:00 pm. See below.] The Active Network is in the starting blocks for its IPO. The San Diego Internet company, which provides online event registration services for sporting event organizers, churches, campgrounds, and other customers, set a price range between $16 and $18 a share for its initial stock offering in a regulatory filing yesterday. The company has not yet set a date for selling its shares.

The Active Network, which filed for its IPO in February, is selling 11 million shares in the offering, with almost 2.8 million shares offered by selling shareholders and 8.2 million from the company itself. At the mid-point of the proposed range, the company would raise a total of about $127 million after fees, which would be mostly used to repay outstanding debt and to fund possible acquisitions. The Active Network’s selling shareholders would pocket just over $47 million, before fees.

[Corrects estimated market valuation to $900.7 million, instead of $990.7 million. See below.] The Active Network was founded in 1998, and has grown through a combination of internal growth and acquisitions. I wrote a profile of the company last year, which you can find here. The company would command a market value of roughly $900.7 million at the mid-point of its price range.

Selling shareholders include ESPN, which would reduce its stake in the Active Network from 21.5 percent to 16.4 percent, and Canaan Partners, which would shrink its stake from 15.5 percent to 11.8 percent.

The Active Network disclosed a net loss of $27.3 million on revenue of $279.6 million in 2010. In the first three months of this year, the company posted a loss of 10.9 million on $72.7 million, narrowing its loss by nearly 9 percent and increasing its revenue by 15 percent in comparison to the same quarter last year.

The company expects the shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ACTV.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.