Security star Fortinet sets price for IPO
Investors still have taste for tech.
By John Dunn | Techworld | Published: 12:02, 18 November 2009
Security star-in-the-making Fortinet has announced more details of its initial public offering (IPO), which was able to set a price of $12.50 (£7.40) per share.
After a three month period in which the shares were touted to institutions and other lead investors, the sum raised for the nine year-old company was above expectations at $156 million for the 12,500,000 shares on offer.
The company will trade on the NASDAQ under the ‘FTNT' ticker from November 18, and has said an extra 1.875 million shares will be made available on a 30-day option if demand proves to be healthy.
Although still loss-making, the company is seen as an increasingly rare investment hope of Californian tech security scene, and indeed the whole notion that companies can expand successfully using IPOs. According to Thomson Reuters, there have been only 10 venture-backed IPOs this year, after a paltry six in the whole of 2008, a huge decline from the heady bubble days of the late 1990s.
Headed by modest Chinese-American founder Ken Xie, the company's success has been built on unified threat management (UTM), a product category invented by analyst IDC to describe multi-function security devices which now has a foothold in the product ranges of every major security player.
The company will use the money to expand through acquisitions, which also happen to be at historically low levels. That process started in August with the spare-change takeover of the assets of promising but defunct high-performance Ethernet startup, Woven Systems.
