The announcement has been long anticipated following a seven-year shopping spree for the firm, which now owns an estimated 77,113 miles of fibre-optic cable routes in 297 markets.
“For private equity investors of this type, once they’ve been investors for seven years, they tend to need to start looking at liquidity, so they will be looking for an exit option in the relatively near term,” Dan Caruso, founder and CEO at Zayo Group, told reporters earlier this year.
In an S-1 filing confirming the IPO, the company said it would use proceeds for general corporate purposes such as acquisitions, working capital, and repaying debt.
Zayo posted a net loss of $137 million on revenue of $1 billion in 2013, but IPO research firm Renaissance Capital said that Zayo could raise an additional $500 million from the IPO, saying that the initial deal size was likely a placeholder.
In 2014 alone, Zayo acquired CoreXchange, Neo Telecoms and Geo Networks amongst others, and in June this year, upgraded its European long-haul network to 100G.
