Cincinnati Bell Announces IPO

In 2010, Cincinnati Bell acquired the data center business, CyrusOne for $525 million. By the end of the fourth quarter, Bell hopes to file IPO documentation and head to the market. The intentions for the IPO are to pay off debt associated with Bell to further expand on their data storage service, CyrusOne. Jack Cassidy, Bell’s CEO stated that they would pursue the IPO under these conditions, “We believe it will likely be in at least the fourth quarter of this year until we can be in the market, should those market conditions be favorable.” It appears that there are no public comments about the matter at this time.

The press release explained that the data center business is a separate entity from the telecommunications segment. CyrusOne has its own management team, separate from Bell, and by the appearance of both companies on their separate websites, there is no indication of an affiliation. After the market closed for the first quarter on Thursday, Bell announced that their revenue has gone up by $3 million from last year. The revenue from the data center grew by 21 percent. This makes Bell’s revenue $363 million and CyrusOne’s $53 million. Wireless revenue, however went down in the fourth quarter from $71 million to $64 million.

Cincinnati Bell claims that their 4G is twice as fast as other leading networks, offers high speed Internet and service packages that beat competitions’. CyrusOne claims to have maintained a customer satisfaction rate of 98 percent in the past years. Aside from data center locations around the Ohio-Kentucky region, CyrusOne has locations in Arizona, eastern Texas, Chicago and the UK.