Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Seventeen Dollars to Buy Out Abbott's Fifth

People treat Boston Scientific as a Marlborough device maker that always printed BSX.

The 1992 issuer was a privately held catheter company whose largest outside holder was Abbott Laboratories.

On 19 May 1992 Boston Scientific sold 23.5 million shares, about 23 percent of the firm, in an initial public offering listed on the New York Stock Exchange as BSX.

Encyclopedia accounts of the offering put the price at 17 dollars a share in 1992 currency and the gross proceeds near 400 million dollars.

The filed range had been 19 to 22 dollars.

Goldman, Sachs and PaineWebber led the books.

Abbott had held about 20 percent of the company and sold that block back through the offering.

Boston Scientific used the cash to repurchase the Abbott stake, cut debt, and fund plant.

After the sale the founding families still held about two-thirds of the equity.

The mechanism is a medical-device shop using an IPO not mainly to raise growth capital but to cash out a corporate minority holder and put a ticker on the rest.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.