My two cents on the question you pose (why are LU and NN selling their JNPR stakes?): When Lucent and Newbridge invested in Juniper's early private round, they needed a play against Cisco in the high-end "super-router" space. There weren't many alternatives to invest in at the time, so a lot of the big guys got behind JNPR en masse' as the blessed challenger to CSCO's 12000 (and beyond). Now that there are dozens of hot super-router, terrabit router, and optical startups, they have many more options. Both LU and NN are likely to be locking and loading to buy some of them pre-IPO (they've already made some big moves, like NN+NorthChurch this week). Thus, their CFO types would be inclined to bank their humongo gains on Juniper now, both to avoid the complications and headaches incumbent with owning part of a direct competitor, and because it is a nice way to econonically fund the purchase of (another) super-router startup. Using windfall gains for a similar funny money project... tends to make those guys look like a genious to their CEO/Board, etc. My guess is they would probably have terms in their investment contracts which allows them to call for this early secondary, selling their shares to the public. To keep JNPR happy, the 1.5M shares...
It'll be intereting to see how they PRICE those secondary shares!
Can't you see them planning THAT one out? 5M to go at 200? 250? Hmmm...
This is not any kind of informed or semi-insider information, just logical speculation, have seen similar movies before
(Cisco's investment in CSCC, etc).
-PA |
