Initial Public Offerings

Diedrich Coffee said Tuesday that it will sell 2.2 million shares of common stock for $15.6 million and use the proceeds to aggressively expand the family-owned chain. Coffeehouse industry observers had been expecting Irvine-based Diedrich to make a public stock offering in order to remain competitive with larger, fast-growing competitors.

Remedytemp Inc. said Thursday it sold 3.1 million common shares for $40.3 million, or $13 a share, in an initial public offering of its stock. The company had expected the shares to be offered at $12 to $14 each. Remedytemp, which provides temporary office staffing, said a portion of the proceeds will be distributed to shareholders before the offering. The rest will be used for general corporate purposes. Remedytemp shares closed at $14.625 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Two Orange County companies took the plunge into a rough stock market Friday, floating initial public offerings with mixed results. First Alliance Corporation, an Irvine-based lender specializing in home mortgages for high-risk borrowers, raised $59.5 million with its sale of 3.5 million shares on the Nasdaq exchange. The stock closed its first day of trading at $18.63 after opening at $17 a share.

Family-owned Diedrich Coffee, which said it spurned a buyer two years ago for fear of growing too fast, has itself embarked on an aggressive expansion drive and is expected to go public soon to grow even more. The company, which carefully built and nurtured eight Orange County coffee shops over 23 years, added 22 new locations as far away as Denver and Houston in the past two years. Steven A.

When Marcos Sanchez and 11 colleagues sold their fledgling Internet company to San Francisco-based Macromedia Inc. last March, they pocketed 860,000 shares of the multimedia software company's stock, worth a tidy $32 million. "It was a nice nest egg," recalls Sanchez, now a product manager with Macromedia. The nest egg isn't quite so nice anymore.

The gyrating stock market and lukewarm reception for recent initial public stock offerings are causing more companies to shelve plans for new and secondary stock sales. The market that was once white-hot, especially for high-technology and medical issues as well as for small companies, has cooled considerably in the last month, industry analysts say. "Anything in technology right now is kind of on hold," said Hans Luft, an analyst at investment banker Rodman & Renshaw Inc.'s Boston office.

With a curious sense of timing, giant Ingram Micro Inc. has filed for permission to sell stock to the public for the first time despite a softened market for technology issues and the fact that the company hasn't replaced its recently departed chief executive. The Santa Ana-based company, which until now has remained a private firm even though it is the largest computer products distributor in the world, plans to offer 20 million shares of stock.

Xylan Corp., a Calabasas-based maker of computer switching technology, became the hottest initial public offering of the year Tuesday when its stock price more than doubled in its first day of trading, reflecting investors' voracious appetite for some high-tech issues. Xylan's stock soared from the initial offering price of $26 a share to its close at $58.375 on the Nasdaq market. The company's shares were the biggest percentage gainer for the day in U.S. markets. A total of 5.

You say you always wanted to own stock in a company that makes polyvinyl-chloride-coated rigid steel piping? You'll get your chance soon, when Van Nuys-based Ocal Inc. tries to sell shares for the first time. Or maybe you've hankered to have a stake in a business that makes "rapid prototyping systems," which quickly produce test models of industrial parts or new consumer products from three-dimensional computer images. If so, Torrance-based Helisys Inc.'s upcoming stock offering may be for you.