business
HCA resets stock market return
■ The nation's largest hospital chain has privatized and gone public twice before. No date is set for its planned third IPO.
By Emily Berry — Posted Jan. 20, 2011
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Nashville, Tenn.-based hospital chain HCA is expected to become a publicly owned company once again in 2011 after refiling for an initial public offering on Dec. 22, 2010.
The company had filed for an IPO in May 2010, but scrapped that plan temporarily in November as it reorganized and took on more debt. No date has been set for the 2011 IPO.
The largest nongovernmental operator of hospitals in the U.S., HCA owned and operated 162 hospitals in 20 states and in England as of Sept. 30, 2010. The company made a net profit of more than $1 billion in 2009 but carried about $26 billion in debt at the same time, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In November 2010, the company added $1.5 billion more in debt.
HCA has been held by private equity firm investors since November 2006.
This would be the third time HCA has gone public. The company, founded in 1968, first went public in 1969. It took itself private in 1988, then went public again in 1992.
Its most recent privatization was in 2006 by a group of private equity investors, including Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Merrill Lynch, along with HCA co-founder Thomas F. Frist Jr., MD. At the time, the $33 billion deal was the largest leveraged buyout in history. A leveraged buyout occurs when a small group of investors take a company private by buying all the stock using equity and debt.
Most of the $33 billion in the 2006 buyout was financed with debt.
In its Dec. 22 filing with the SEC, the company's ownership, now called HCA Holdings, said it expected to raise $2.5 billion through the sale.
