VISA PLANS TO RAISE $10 BILLION IN IPO
November 11, 2007
Visa Inc., the world's largest debit and credit card network, wants to raise $10 billion through its initial public offering, the company said in a filing late Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Visa, based in San Francisco, did not schedule the date of its IPO, or set a share price, according to its S-1 Registration.The payments network said it will use proceeds from the IPO to settle judgments, pay underwriters' expenses, redeem shares of its class "B" and "C" common stock and pay general-corporate expenses. The company's underwriters are: JPMorgan Chase & Co., Banc of America Securities LLC, Citigroup Inc., HSBC, Merrill Lynch & Co., UBS Investment Bank, Wachovia Securities and Goldman, Sachs & Co. Visa's initial public offering is highly anticipated because of the success of rival MasterCard Worldwide's IPO. Purchase, N.Y.-based MasterCard became a stockholder-owned company in May at $39 per share and since then the value of its stock has more than quadrupled.
MasterCard's stock closed Friday at $193. Visa announced its plans to become a publicly traded company Oct. 11, 2006, and last month Visa completed a reorganization in which Visa Canada, Visa International and Visa USA all became Visa Inc. Visa Europe is a licensee; therefore, it will remain a separate company. In its 442-page filing, Visa said it derived its revenues, primarily from card-service fees, data-processing fees and international-transaction fees. The company reported operating revenues of $3.73 billion for the nine months ended June 30 and a net income of $771 million for the same period. For the fiscal year ended June 30, Visa reported operating revenues of $3.9 billion and a net income of $437 million.
Visa said its credit card payments volume was $924.7 billion for the nine-month period ended March 31. For the 12 months ended June 30, credit card payments volume was $1.1 trillion. Debit card payments volume for the nine months ended March 31 was $532.7 billion, up 13% compared with the same period last year. Debit payments volume for the 12 months ended June 30 was $643.5 billion, up 24% compared with the same nine-month period last year. Visa, which says its brand is accepted in more than 170 countries, plans to grow the franchise by expanding into the high-growth markets of Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Visa in September announced that the SEC had approved its registration statement regarding its proposed restructuring that would lead to the IPO.