San Antonio Wound-Care Company Eyes (Another) Initial Public Offering

San Antonio—Acelity may become a public company again, eight years after a consortium of private equity firms took the company, then known as Kinetic Concepts, private.

KCI Holdings, an affiliate of Acelity, filed paperwork Thursday morning with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that proposes to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The San Antonio-based company said it planned to use any funds raised in the planned offering to pay down debt, specifically $590 million in high-priority debt. The company has almost $2.38 billion in debt, according to a regulatory filing.

Acelity sells wound-healing devices, such as pumps that use vacuum pressure to help heal ulcers and other hard-to-treat wounds. It canceled plans for an IPO in December 2016, in which Acelity anticipated raising $1 billion from investors, because of market conditions. Later that month, it sold its LifeCell business unit to Dublin-based biopharmaceutical company Allergan for $2.9 billion. LifeCell was Acelity’s regenerative medicine division, and selling it was part of an attempt to focus its business on its core wound-healing devices.

That and other divestitures have helped make the business more competitive, as did its move to hire Andrew Eckert as its new CEO in 2017 and its launch of 42 products since 2015, the company says in the regulatory filing.

Acelity was founded in 1976, and was known as Kinetic Concepts until 2014. The company has been taken public twice previously, once it 1988 and a second time in 2004. (It was taken private in 1997, according to the San Antonio Express-News.) In 2011, the business was acquired by the private equity consortium for $6.3 billion led by Apax Partners. The group also included Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Public Sector Pension Investment Board. Those firms will continue to “own a majority of the shares eligible to vote in the election of our directors,” according to the filing.

After a restructuring, KCI will become the holding company of Acelity and its subsidiaries, according to a news release.

Author: David Holley

David is the national correspondent at Xconomy. He has spent most of his career covering business of every kind, from breweries in Oregon to investment banks in New York. A native of the Pacific Northwest, David started his career reporting at weekly and daily newspapers, covering murder trials, city council meetings, the expanding startup tech industry in the region, and everything between. He left the West Coast to pursue business journalism in New York, first writing about biotech and then private equity at The Deal. After a stint at Bloomberg News writing about high-yield bonds and leveraged loans, David relocated from New York to Austin, TX. He graduated from Portland State University.