Washington, D.C.-based The Carlyle Group sold 11.5 million shares of telecom equipment company CommScope Inc., which is located in Hickory, for $333 million.
Carlyle sold 11.5 million shares at a price of $29.04, according to a Form 4 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The assent management firm in Washington took CommScope private in 2010 for $3.9 billion. This was the biggest takeover in the telecommunications-equipment industry in at least two years, Bloomberg reported.
After three years under Carlyle’s ownership, CommScope’s sales began to increase, and CommScope, which is now listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “COMM,” had its public debut in 2013.
In 2013, the stock opened at $15.14, 14 cents above its initial public offering, and the deal raised $577 million, valuing the company at $2.8 billion, The New York Times reported.
Carlyle Group, which has been steadily decreasing its stake in CommScope since the 2013 IPO, now directly owns 29,716,970 shares, or approximately 15.4 percent.
Credit Suisse Securities acted as the sole underwriter for this offering, and CommScope didn’t receive any of the proceeds from the stock sale, the company said in a statement last week.
CommScope’s shares closed on Aug. 30 at $29.52, and the stock is down $2.83, or 8.7 percent, for the year.
Note: This story is from the North Carolina Business News Wire, a service of UNC–Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism
