Aleris International, the Beachwood aluminum producer and recycling company plans to recycle itself again.
The company said that it plans to become a public company again. In the last 7 years, Aleris also has gone through mergers buyouts from private equity firms, bankruptcy and restructuring.
The company's registration statement filed doesn't yet list how many shares it plans to sell how much money it hopes to raise which investment banks will underwrite the deal or when a possible initial public offering could take place. Company officials declined to comment on those issues.
Aleris said that in its statement filed with the SEC, it plans to use the proceeds from the IPO to fund operations and to invest in a joint-venture aluminum mill in China. The company didn't say why it is choosing to start the IPO process now but executives have been hinting about an IPO since late last year. Returning to the public markets would be a big step for Aleris, a company with a pretty turbulent history over the past decade.
Mr Steve Demetriou CEO of Aleris formed the company in 2004 when he merged Kentucky based Commonwealth Aluminum with Texas based IMCO Recycling. The merger combined one of the biggest producers of aluminum in the country with one of the biggest recyclers. At the time, Demetriou noted that the companies had been partners in many ventures with IMCO providing raw material to Commonwealth.
Mr Demetriou who had just sold specialty chemicals company Noveon to Lubrizol, moved the merged company's headquarters to Beachwood and expanded Aleris by buying other companies. Earnings grew quickly, eventually attracting the attention of private equity companies.
The Texas Pacific Group bought Aleris in 2006, taking the company private. At the time, aluminum prices were high and rising, so Mr Demetriou and others said the fact that the deal put USD 2.5 billion in debt on Aleris' books wasn't a problem. That is not an extraordinary level of debt.
Mr Demetriou said that Aleris asked the Texas Pacific Group for the money, saying the underlying business was still functioning but it needed to stay current with its credit agreements to survive. We were privately held by a private equity company that decided not to inject capital when we needed capital. And almost every company needed capital during this period. Without fresh cash from Texas Pacific, Aleris filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
He said that our message was pretty clear. Chapter 11 was a capitalization process. There was nothing broken in the company. The debt levels that seemed manageable when aluminum was expensive became oppressive when commodity prices fell. Fortunately, Aleris' customers and partners were experiencing the same problems.
Mr Demetriou said that we actually gained some market share during the bankruptcy process because we weren't the only company that was suffering. Clearly there's a taint and stress from Chapter 11, but in that period, if you had to go through it, that was the time to go through it. Everyone was going through some sort of restructuring, whether they used Chapter 11 or not.
(Sourced from www.worldal.com)
