Stock Offerings

Bayhawk Ales Inc. is barely a bubble in the huge beer market, but more than 300 investors have wagered $1.2 million so far that the fledgling Irvine microbrewery will be a success. Operators of the pint-size brewery, which pours out about 1,500 gallons of ale a week in full view of patrons in an upscale bar and seafood restaurant, paint a romantic picture of providing investors entree into an industry that is going nowhere but up.

SAN FRANCISCO — Dressed in his trademark hoodie and jeans, Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a cross-country roadshow to pitch his company's initial public stock offering. Hundreds of institutional investors stood in long lines Monday to pile into a ballroom at New York's Sheraton Hotel to hear the billion-dollar pitch from the 27-year-old chief executive before his company's hotly anticipated IPO. The meeting was closed to the media. Facebook is trying to build excitement for the IPO that in a few weeks could value the company at more than $96 billion.

Sensormedics Corp., which won a UC Irvine award for creating the best new medical device last year, said Tuesday that it has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to become a public company by selling 1.7 million shares in March. The company, which manufactures a ventilator for premature babies, said it wants to raise about $23 million to be used for expanding the company and paying off debt.

AMC Entertainment Inc., the nation's second-largest movie exhibitor, has once again scrapped plans for a stock offering, two people familiar with the matter said. The Kansas City, Mo., theater chain had said in a regulatory filing last spring that it planned to raise as much as $450 million in an initial public offering of stock, using the proceeds to pay down debt. Top shareholders in AMC include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Apollo Investment Fund and Bain Capital Investors. But at the prompting of AMC's owners, the circuit has opted to shelve the IPO out of concern that market conditions aren't ripe for a stock offering, said two sources familiar with the plans who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Charles Schwab Corp. said it will sell stock offerings arranged by investment banks Credit Suisse First Boston, J.P. Morgan & Co. and Hambrecht & Quist, further blurring the lines between full-service and discount brokerage firms. "It goes one step further in giving Schwab the arsenal of products to further compete with the full-service firms," said Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst Richard Strauss. The move by San Francisco-based Schwab, the largest discount broker in the U.S., with 4.

Activision Inc., a maker of games for computers and home video game systems, postponed a planned public offering of an additional 6 million common shares because of market volatility resulting from the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Activision had filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in July to sell 5 million shares. Co-chairmen Robert Kotick and Brian Kelly added a combined 1 million shares of their own in August.

Powerwave Technologies Inc. said Tuesday that its registration statement for a public offering of 3.25 million shares of common stock has been declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Powerwave will sell 750,000 shares and certain selling shareholders will sell 2.5 million shares. The offering price was set at $22 per share, and Powerwave is expected to receive net proceeds of about $15.2 million.

Advanced Logic Research Inc., a maker of personal computers, said Friday that it plans to raise an estimated $23 million by issuing 1.5 million shares of stock in a secondary offering. James T. Richardson, chief financial officer, said the company is raising the money to partially repay $10.5 million in long-term debt, to increase working capital and to expand a manufacturing plant in Singapore.

Oakley Inc., the maker of premium-priced sports sunglasses, is scheduled to begin selling 10 million shares of stock for the first time today to raise at least $180 million for the owners and the company. Merrill Lynch & Co., the lead underwriter, said Wednesday that it will price the stock at $23 a share for initial buyers. The company's prospectus had projected an initial price range of $18 to $20 a share. The Irvine-based company is selling 3.

Microsoft Corp. increased the size of its preferred stock offering to $1 billion from $750 million, signaling high investor demand for the new income-yielding stock. The Redmond, Wash., software giant registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell an additional $137.5 million worth of the preferred shares based on a preferred share price of $79.875. The price was determined by the closing price of the common shares on Nasdaq.

SAN FRANCISCO — The rapid growth of Facebook Inc. showed signs of slowing in the first quarter, potentially cooling investors' fervor just weeks before the company's hotly anticipated initial public stock offering. Facebook generated $1.06 billion in sales, the second quarter in a row sales topped $1 billion. That represented a 45% jump from a year earlier but a 6% decline compared with the fourth quarter. The financial performance, the company's most anemic since at least 2010, fell below analysts' expectations.

Zynga Inc., the maker of online social games FarmVille and Words With Friends, will seek to raise $400 million in a secondary public stock offering and rejigger when employees can sell their shares. The moves are designed to help prevent a sudden drop in the price of the San Francisco company's stock. In December, Zynga took in $1 billion in its initial public offering with an eye toward financing an ambitious strategy to expand its products both internationally and to mobile devices.

No one knows Facebook better than Facebook. Only seconds after the company's huge initial public stock offering was announced, Facebook users flooded the social network with comments. "Based on my news feeds, you would think Zuck just took over the world. Oh, Facebook," said Amanda Coolong, producer of a technology news site. "OOO What I could give to be able to get in on this," wrote Alexander Henry Sargent, expressing the oft-repeated hope that shares would be available to the common user.

Facebook has filed papers for what's expected to be the largest initial public offering ever to come out of Silicon Valley and one of the largest in U.S. history. Ending months of breathless speculation, the 8-year-old social networking company has submitted registration documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that set a preliminary goal of raising $5 billion. Facebook is expected to be valued at $75 billion to $100 billion. Final pricing will not be set for months, and the size of the IPO probably will increase with investor demand.

Penetrating the Chinese movie market has long presented any number of challenges to Hollywood studios, from quotas to censorship to cultural sensitivities Add raising money to the list of potential problems. Legendary East, the Chinese film venture established this summer by film finance and production company Legendary Entertainment and its chairman, budding Hollywood mogul Thomas Tull, has canceled plans to raise $220.5 million on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this year after it was unable to find enough investors.

The painful drop in the stock market has sucked the air out of initial public offerings. Companies have withdrawn their stock offerings this month at the fastest pace since the dark days of the 2008 global financial crisis, as suddenly gun-shy investors have lost interest in anything seen as even marginally risky. Beyond the negative effect on investors, the drying up of IPOs is one more obstacle in the path of the U.S. economy as companies have trouble raising cash to boost employment or to invest in new products or facilities, experts say. "It reflects a deterioration in business confidence and an unwillingness to expand the operations of companies," said Jane Caron, economist at Dwight Asset Management in Burlington, Vt. "That means less investment spending, less hiring and therefore less income, not only for the companies but for households.

Simulation Sciences Inc. is planning to offer another 2.6 million shares of common stock, according to documents filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The software provider said existing stockholders will sell 100,000 of the shares. Proceeds from the offering will be used for working capital and general purposes. BT Alex. Brown, Wessels, Arnold & Henderson and Soundview Financial Group Inc. are underwriting the offering, which includes an over-allotment of 390,000 shares.

Here is a roundup of alleged cons, frauds and schemes to watch out for. 'Free' trial offers — The Federal Trade Commission has accused an Alberta, Canada, man and several companies of defrauding consumers of more than $450 million by luring them into "free" trial offers and then charging them for products or services they did not order. The FTC filed a lawsuit in the federal courthouse in Seattle against Jesse Willms and 10 of his companies, accusing them of obtaining victims' credit card numbers as part of free-trial offers and then billing the credit cards for products that were not ordered.

The top financial executive who helped guide General Motors Co. back to profitability and then its return to being a publicly traded company stepped down suddenly Thursday. GM Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell, who worked at the automaker only since January of 2010, said he had achieved his goals for the company and no longer wanted to be a top finance executive. "I won't be a CFO again," Liddell, 52, said. GM's board passed over Liddell in its search for a new chief executive last year when Edward E. Whitacre Jr. quit, settling on Dan Akerson instead.