Warner Music Group IPO Would Use Proceeds to Pay Down Debt
Warner Music Group (WMG), now 4th largest among the world’s top record companies, filed an IPO registration with the SEC Fri. in a bid to raise $750 million by selling common stock and apply the proceeds to pay down debt.
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WMG, bought from Time Warner last year for $2.6 billion by private partners headed by WMG chmn-CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., didn’t say how many shares it would offer or the price. The label was silent Fri. as it entered a quiet period after the SEC filing.
Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Morgan Stanley will be joint global coordinators and, with Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch & Co. and Deutsche Bank Securities, will act as joint book-running managers for the proposed offering, WMG said. Banc of America Securities and Citigroup will act as joint lead managers. A prospectus is not yet available. In its registration with the SEC, WMG said it expected stockholders to sell shares, but didn’t identify them or the number of shares they would offer, on either the N.Y. Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. No ticker symbol has been proposed yet.
WMG, a major backer of DVD-Audio and the DualDisc hybrid DVD/CD, reported a $36 million profit in its first quarter ended Dec. 31. That compared with a year-earlier $1.1 billion loss, and came largely on slashed costs that included job cuts. Revenue in the period fell 7.6% to $1.09 billion, which WMG attributed to fewer new releases in the period than in the past.