The company gained notoriety recently when former Microsoft chief financial officer Greg Maffei joined the company as its chief executive.
The company plans to offer shares on Wall Street as well as in Canada and Europe during the first half of the year, though details about the size of the offering, precise timing, per share pricing, or which investment banks will serve as underwriters have not yet been determined, according to a spokeswoman for the firm.
The company said it will use the proceeds from the stock offering to complete its North American and European networks and to develop related Internet and data services.
The move is unlikely to come as a surprise to many communications industry observers. When Worldwide Fiber added Maffei as chief executive, the company granted a $77.5 million loan to Maffei in order to buy a stake in the company. The generally capital-intensive nature of the business also pointed to a likely initial public offering.
The Vancouver-based company is building a 22,000-mile fiber-optic network in North America with plans to sell bandwidth capacity to Internet service providers and major businesses. Worldwide Fiber, which constructs fiber-optic networks for other communications carriers, also plans to build an undersea trans-Atlantic network and another in Europe for a total of nearly 38,000 miles of fiber worldwide.
The company will file a preliminary prospectus with federal regulators in about a week, according to a spokeswoman.
Play video
There are currently no comments for this post.