Bausch & Lomb files for IPO

Bausch & Lomb, the eyecare group, which employs 1,200 people in Waterford has signalled its intention to return to the US stock market.

Bausch & Lomb Holdings, which is owned by private equity firm Warburg Pincus, filed with US regulators today to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering.

The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filings is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO could be different.

The proposed flotation could raise as much as $1.5 billion and is expected to value Bausch & Lomb at about $9 billion to $10 billion.

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the company said JP Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were the lead underwriters of the offering. It had previously been understood that Bausch & Lomb was working with Goldman Sachs to find a private buyer for the business.

Based in Rochester, New York, Bausch & Lomb makes contact lenses, eye drugs and surgical equipment and sells its products in more than 100 countries.

The Waterford plant is the site of its principal contact lens manufacturing business.

The company, which dates back to 1853, generated $3 billion in sales last year, more than 40 per cent of it in North America.

Warburg bought Bausch & Lomb in a leveraged buyout in 2007 for about $4.5 billion, including $830 million of debt, after it fell out of Wall Street's favour because of product recalls, big charges and restatements of earnings. Warburg Pincus committed over $1 billion of equity toward the buyout.

The company didn't specify whether it would sell shares in the offering. – Bloomberg / Reuters