Priceline.com, which offers a web-based pricing system for travel, automobiles and financial services, announced that its planned secondary offering of common stock was reduced in size and it has canceled a debt offering altogether due to concerns over current market conditions. The Stamford, Connecticut-based company cut the offering by one million shares to 4.5 million and sold them at $67 each – $3 below Wednesday’s closing price.
Of the shares sold, one million were offered by the company and the rest by existing stockholders. The selling stockholders have granted the underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, an option to purchase up to 675,000 additional shares to cover over- allotments, which may seem unlikely given the circumstances. Priceline fell $2.6875 Thursday to close at $67.3125.
In addition to the reduction – the company itself had initially planned to sell two million shares – Priceline also decided not to proceed with the previously-announced concurrent offering of $275m in convertible subordinated notes. Priceline’s shares have dropped more than 15% since it first filed for the offerings about two weeks ago.
The company joins chipmaker LSI Logic Inc, which recently canceled a debt and stock sale of its own, and healthcare portal Medscape Inc, which backed off on its IPO earlier this week, in the growing wave of retreats from the market due to an overall downturn in tech stocks over the past several months.
Priceline went public in March and saw the shares soar as much as 431% on the first day of trading. The stock sold as high as $85 before closing at $69, up 331% from the $16 offering price – itself upped substantially from an initial range of $7 to $9. Priceline sold 10 million shares in the IPO.
