Finance History | Nasdaq MarketSite — Fifteen Dollars and a Private-Equity Analog Exit

People treat Broadcom as a Palo Alto chip-and-software house that always printed AVGO.

The 2009 issuer was Avago Technologies Limited, a Singapore-registered analog-chip company owned in part by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Silver Lake after a 2005 buyout of Hewlett-Packard's former semiconductor line.

On 5 August 2009 Avago priced 43,200,000 ordinary shares at 15 dollars each, 21,500,000 from the company and 21,700,000 from selling shareholders.

The company said that was 20 percent more stock than the 36,000,000 shares first registered, and the top of a 13-to-15-dollar range.

Reuters, writing that night, put the proceeds at 648 million dollars in 2009 currency and called the deal the second-largest United States offering of that year after Mead Johnson.

Trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under AVGO began on 6 August 2009.

Reuters recorded the first print at 16.51 dollars, 10.1 percent above the offer.

The mechanism is a private-equity exit. The buyout owners sold a slice of a leveraged analog book into a public tape and used the cash to cut debt.

The later Broadcom name is a 2016 acquisition of Broadcom Corporation by this Avago line, not a second IPO.

The pin is the public facade of Nasdaq MarketSite at 4 Times Square, the exchange's street presence. Interior studios are not a visitor floor.

Photo: Luca Marfè, June 2015, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Nasdaq MarketSite.