Aeroflex of Plainview to go public, again

Aeroflex Inc., a Plainview electronics company that went private less than three years ago, plans to go public again with a $500-million initial public offering by its parent company.

Much of the money that Aeroflex Holding Corp. raises will go toward retiring what the company characterized as "substantial indebtedness" in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Company officials declined to comment Wednesday.

In its most recent annual report, Aeroflex said it had $889.3 million of debt as of June 30.

That report noted that the indebtedness could make the company vulnerable to a poor economy, force it to divert a substantial amount of cash to pay debt service and make it difficult to make expenditures and stay competitive with companies that don't have the same debt burden.

In a more recent SEC filing, the company said interest expense was $21.4 million in 2009. For the six months that ended Dec. 31, Aeroflex had a net loss of $31.2 million and revenue of $297 million.

Aeroflex, which was public for 46 years before private equity investors bought it for $1.1 billion in 2007, designs and makes semiconductors and other high-tech components used by the military, space programs and the medical and broadband communications industries.

Aeroflex did not say in the regulatory filing when it planned to go public, how many shares it planned to issue or for how much it hoped to sell them.

But its IPO would be the second-biggest this year after Sensata Technologies Holding NV went public last month, raising about $569 million.

After a lull in the IPO market early this year due to turbulent stock markets, the successful debuts of small, fast-growing technology companies in March have helped bring investors' appetite for offerings back to life.

Aeroflex plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "ARX."

The lead underwriters are Goldman Sachs, which owns more than 10 percent of the company's stock, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley.

Aeroflex has offices and more than 2,600 employees around the world.

With AP