The big “Q” is going public – again – and at the top of the range it had cited in SEC filings.

it’s also offering 1 million more shares than previously planned.

Quintiles, the world’s largest life science services company, formally priced its public offering of nearly 24 million shares Wednesday night.

The company plans to sell nearly 23.7 million shares at a price of $40.

The total of some $940 million will make the Quintiles IPO the largest ever in the Triangle, according to veteran financial analysts who have monitored RTP stock trading for more than two decades.

Quintiles shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “Q.”

The company itself is selling 13.125 million shares.

Existing investors and owners, including co-founder and Chairman Dr. Dennis Gillings, are selling another 10.6 million shares.

In earlier securities filings, Quintiles had estimated net proceeds from the offering of approximately $489.8 million, after commissions and expenses. Most of the proceeds would be used to pay down debt. The company will also pay a one-time $25 million “termination fee” to Gillings and other private equity investors in the company. Any remaining proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes.

The public offering is be the second for Quintiles. The clinical research organization went public in 1994, only to be taken private again in 2003 when Gillings and others bought out stockholders.

Boston-based Bain and TPG of Fort Worth, Texas, own about 23 percent each of Quintiles, while affiliates of London-based 3i Group Plc hold 15 percent and Singapore state-owned asset manager Temasek Holdings Pte owns almost 10 percent. G

The private equity firms bought Quintiles in a deal that valued the ompany at about $3.8 billion, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg news last year.

The company is going public with markets at record highs and IPOs coming at a rapid rate.

Gillings founded Quintiles more than three decades ago while he was a biostatistics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While he was still teaching he also performed consulting services for drug firms, at times including his students in the work. The company that became Quintiles started in a trailer on the UNC campus. Now a global player with operations in about 100 countries, Quintiles is the largest firm among clinical research organizations and the company generated revenue of $3.7 billion in 2012 and net income of $177.5 million, according to its SEC filing. Quintiles employs more than 27,000 employees worldwide.

The underwriters of the offering, which includes a laundry list of Wall Street heavy hitters, have the option to purchase another 3.5 million shares.

Morgan Stanley, Barclays and J.P. Morgan are co-leads for the offering. Also participating are Citigroup, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Wells Fargo Securities, BofA Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank Securities, Baird, William Blair and Jefferies are serving as lead co-managers, and Guggenheim Securities, Piper Jaffray, Raymond James, RBC Capital Markets and UBS Investment Bank, Quintiles said in a statement.

In earlier SEC filings, Quintiles had cited a range of between $36 and $40 for the shares.

Originally, Quintiles had expected to seek $600 million when it first filed for the Initial Public Offering of shares in February.

The move toward a larger IPO could have been given a boost by Quintiles’ first-quarter financials as recorded in the filing. Some of the company’s first quarter 2013 numbers look pretty strong, as WRALTechWire reported on April 19.

Total service revenue was $927 million in the first quarter; the company also reported total net new business of $1.2 billion. Those figures came from an updated filing that the Durham pharmaceutical services firm filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. This filing, an update to the registration statement filed in February for an initial public stock offering, offered no pricing information for Quintiles stock. But the company did disclose partial, preliminary and unaudited first quarter financials.

The $927 million in service revenue for the first quarter was up up 4.3 percent compared to the $888 million the company recorded for the first quarter of 2012.

(Bloomberg news contributed to this report.)

[QUINTILES ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of Quintiles stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]