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Medical-Services Company Going Public This Week

Posted on: Tuesday, 13 December 2005, 21:00 CST

By Aldo Svaldi, The Denver Post

Dec. 11--Emergency Medical Services Corp. plans to go public this week in an initial stock offering.

The Greenwood Village company plans to offer 7.8 million shares priced at between $15 and $17 a share. Those shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker EMS.

Emergency Medical provides private ambulance services under the AMR brand and emergency-room services under the EmCare brand.

"AMR has an 8 percent share of the total ambulance services market and a 21 percent share of the private provider ambulance market, with net revenue approximately twice that of our only national competitor," the company said in its filings. During fiscal 2004, AMR treated and transported about 3.7 million patients in 34 states.

For the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, the company generated net revenue of $1.6 billion and net income of $37.3 million.

The company plans to use $100 million of its IPO proceeds to repay debt and the remainder for general corporate purposes.

Emergency Medical initially set terms of its offering on Oct. 19. Although nearly two months may seem like a long time, it is not unusual for a company to take that long to hit the markets, especially if there is an intervening holiday, said Melanie Hase, an analyst with Renaissance Capital, a Greenwich, Conn., provider of independent research on initial public offerings.

Emergency Medical will be hitting the markets during a busy week for IPOs, Hase said. "The IPO market has picked up," she said.

Underwriters for the offering include some of Wall Street's heaviest hitters -- Banc of America Securities, JPMorgan, CIBC World Markets, Credit Suisse First Boston and Goldman Sachs & Co.

In February, an investor group led by Onex Partners LP and Onex Corp., along with management, purchased AMR and EmCare for $828.8 million from Laidlaw International, a Canadian holding company that had acquired the two firms in 1997.

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Source: The Denver Post

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