As it promised two years ago (CI No 3,013), Canadian electronics manufacturing services company Celestica Holdings Inc, once owned by IBM Canada Ltd (CI No 3,011), has filed to go public with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Canadian securities authorities for an initial public offering of subordinate voting shares. The holding company, Celestica International Holdings, will change its name to Celestica Inc for the flotation, and Celestica Inc will change to Celestica North America Inc. The company expects gross proceeds of the offering to be around $350m, which it will use to prepay debt. IBM sold Celestica to Onex Corp back in January 1994 (CI No 2,299), and Celestica stated at the time that it would eventually go public, and that it was looking at acquisition opportunities in the US, Europe and Asia. It has certainly been fulfilling the latter promise, hungrily buying up businesses such as ICL PLC’s Design to Distribution Ltd last year (CI No 3,074), Madge Networks’ Token Ring and ATM plant in Dublin in February (CI No 3,354), and last month Lucent Technologies Inc’s manufacturing facilities in Monterrey, Mexico.
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