The financial investor Apollo Global Management is currently preparing ADT, a security firm acquired only a year ago and taken out by the stock exchange, to go public in one of the biggest IPO this year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The initial public offering could be formally filed in the autumn so that the initial listing could be made at the end of the year. ADT should be valued at 15 billion dollars including debts. It is still unclear how the volume of the IPO could turn out.
Should Apollo bring parts of ADT into the stock market this year, it would be an unusually fast exit. The investor had bought the company last year for about 17 billion dollars and put together with its already existing companies Protection 1 and ASG Securities. Such a rapid market debut would be a proof to the current high demand for companies specialized in security solutions for private households.
ADT had previously belonged to the company’s braid of the tyco conglomerate, which had meanwhile broken again due to the false accounting practices. Apollo, in turn, is one of the world’s most successful financial investors. The company is known for its aggressive style, often betting against electricity. Recently, Apollo had collected 23.5 billion dollars for the largest fund ever to invest in company acquisitions.
According to data from February 2016, the month of the ADT takeover, ADT and Protection 1 reached an annualized revenue of more than 4.2 billion dollars and about 21 000 employees. The market for the automation, security and surveillance of households and enterprises is currently considered to be growing rapidly. In the past few years, some major acquisitions have taken place here. Thus, Google had paid around 3.2 billion dollars for Nest, a specialist for self-learning thermostats and smoke detectors in early 2014.
So far in 2017, private equity backed companies managed to collect around $5.9 billion in public offerings, representing a fall of 30 percent from the same period in 2015 and 70 percent in 2014. In 2016, $3.4 billion was raised in what was a particularly slow year for market debuts around the globe.
