NICE Systems today submitted a draft prospectus to the US Securities Exchange Commission, for a 2.5 million share flotation. NICE shares currently trade around the $30 mark, and the issue is therefore expected to bring in $75 million. Lead underwriter will be Lehman Brothers, along with Hambrecht & Quist, Oppenheimer and Salomon Brothers.
NICE’s follow-on issue is almost obligatory, in light of the share’s sharp rise over the past year and a half, since its Wall Street IPO. NICE, which previously traded on the TASE, raised $20 million in January 1996, at $10 per share. Since then, NICE has seen mainly the heights, reaching a peak of $32 last month.
NICE ended Q1 ’97 on NIS 7.3 million net profit, and NIS 44.8 million in revenues. The improvement in financial results over the past year was due to increased sales of its Computer Telephony Integrated (CTI) product line, including the NiceLog system, as well as communications intelligence systems. The NiceLog system is a multi-channel digital recording system which enables recording, processing and recall of audio information over organization-wide telephone networks.
Also today, NICE announced it signed an agreement to acquire Canadian company Dees Communications for $8 million in cash and up to 500,000 in NICE shares. The deal will be closed before the end of Q3 ’97.
Both NICE and Dees provide solutions for CTI logging, monitoring and management.