Initial Stock Offerings

Time Warner Cable Inc., the nation's second-largest cable TV systems and the dominant player in Southern California, filed for an initial public stock offering Wednesday, potentially setting the stage for future acquisitions. The offering, which had been expected, is aimed chiefly at giving creditors in Adelphia Communications Corp. an opportunity to sell some of the shares they received when parent Time Warner Inc. and Comcast Corp.

Russian oil firm Rosneft said Friday that its initial public stock offering raised $10.4 billion, half of it from a handful of buyers including oil giant BP, but a British court challenge from rival Yukos Oil Co. threatened to delay its market debut. Russia is keen to make a splash with the share offering as it hosts its first summit of the Group of 8 leading industrialized nations this weekend. By selling shares of the state-controlled firm to the likes of BP, analysts say President Vladimir V.

Thomas Weisel Partners Group Inc., the investment bank founded by the former chief executive of Montgomery Securities, said it planned to raise as much as $65 million in an initial public offering. The San Francisco-based firm founded seven years ago by Thomas W. Weisel is managing its IPO together with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Keefe Bruyette & Woods Inc., a Securities and Exchange Commission filing said. The company didn't say how many shares or at what price it planned to sell stock.

Google Inc.'s stock debut may have grabbed the headlines in 2004, but the revival of the market for initial public offerings was no one-hit wonder. In fact, the IPOs of 15 companies -- three of them based in Southern California -- have racked up even bigger post-offering gains than the 119% jump in the price of Google's shares since their debut in August.

Google Inc. became an Internet phenom by helping people find things. Shame it couldn't have found a better time for an initial public offering. Google shares could begin trading on Nasdaq as early as Wednesday. If they do, they'll be hitting the market in one of the roughest climates for IPOs since the dot-com crash. The Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine company said Monday that it had asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to give final approval to its IPO registration by 1 p.m.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has decided not to bring criminal charges against Credit Suisse First Boston over the firm's handling of initial public stock offerings during the late-1990s IPO boom, the investment bank announced Thursday. The U.S. attorney's office had been investigating how CSFB allocated shares of IPOs to investors as part of a far-reaching government probe of the IPO practices of major Wall Street brokerages.

Several law firms filed suits this week against communications company Global Crossing Ltd., its executives and directors, Wall Street underwriter Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and others, accusing them of violating securities laws during Global Crossing's 1998 initial stock offering and the 1999 stock purchase of Frontier Corp. The lawsuits were filed in U.S.

Loudcloud Inc., an Internet consultant headed by Web pioneer Marc Andreessen, has halved the implied market value of the company as it plans its initial public stock sale. Loudcloud would have an initial market value of as much as $674 million, according to amended plans filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company in December had estimated its initial market capitalization would be as much as $1.3 billion.

Verizon Communications' (ticker symbol: VZ) Verizon Wireless Inc., the No. 1 U.S. mobile phone business, filed Thursday to go public in what would be one of the biggest initial stock sales ever. The Bedminster, N.J.-based wireless unit, which has more than 25 million customers, gave a preliminary assessment in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the initial public offering could raise $5 billion, making it the third-biggest IPO in U.S. history.