New York : Nielsen Holdings BV, the television-audience rating company owned by investors including Blackstone Group LP and Carlyle Group, filed to raise as much as $1.75 billion (Dh6.42 billion) in an initial public offering.
Nielsen will use the money to pay down debt, the New York-based company said Wednesday in a filing the Securities and Exchange Commission. JPMorgan Chase & Co and Morgan Stanley, together with Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Citigroup Inc will manage the IPO.
Nielsen is going public four years after it was acquired by a group of six leveraged buyout firms for $10.2 billion. Private equity firms, which spent a record $1.6 trillion on deals from 2005 to 2007, are selling assets in initial public offerings to return cash to their investors.
Forging on
Nielsen is pressing ahead with the IPO even after the European debt crisis triggered a 9.9 per cent slump in the MSCI World Index of developed-nation stocks in May and at least 20 companies worldwide postponed or shelved IPOs. Initial offerings from US companies backed by buyout firms are also losing money for investors for the first time in a least a decade.
Nielsen's owners also include New York-based KKR & Co, Thomas H. Lee Partners LP in Boston, AlpInvest Partners NV of Amsterdam and San Francisco-based Hellman & Friedman LLC. The company changed its name from VNU Group BV in 2007.
