The CZR offering was very slickly done. By pricing the shares at $9.00 and limiting the offering to only 1.4% of the company's outstanding shares, they got a nice pop. The morning pre-offering valuation of $1.13 billion is now $1.92 billion.
Caesars Shares Jump on Debut
By KEVIN ROOSE
DealBook
New York Times
4:33 p.m. | Updated
Caesars Entertainment’s first day of public trading is paying off for investors willing to gamble on the battered casino chain.
Shares of the company, which were priced at $9 on Tuesday, nearly doubled on Wednesday as the company, which was taken private in a 2008 leveraged buyout and subsequently lost billions of dollars in value, re-entered the market in an initial public offering.
Caesars stock, which trades on the Nasdaq under the “CZR” ticker symbol, jumped to more than $13 in the opening minutes of trading, then continued to climb, briefly scraping almost $18 a share before closing at $15.39.
First-day pop aside, the Caesars offering is a tiny fraction of the size of other marquee debuts. Only 1.8 million shares, or about 1.4 percent, of the company’s shares were offered, and only $16 million raised. That is a far cry from the $531 million Caesars tried to raise in an aborted 2010 I.P.O. attempt, and an even further from the $31 billion leveraged buyout that placed Caesars (then called Harrah’s) in the hands of Apollo and TPG Capital back in 2008.
Still, the company’s impressive return to the public market should inspire sighs of relief for some Caesars investors, who have watched it struggle for years under a huge debt load and will now be able to unload their stakes.
Under the terms of the offering, some investors, including Paulson & Company, will be able to sell shares immediately, while others will be required to wait 180 days to unload their full stakes. Apollo and TPG are not among the sellers in the offering, according to the I.P.O. prospectus.
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