Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Fifteen Fifty for Eighteen Percent of the Ships

People treat Carnival as a Bermuda holding company that always printed a single CCL line on the New York tape.

The 1987 issuer was still Carnival Cruise Lines, a Panama corporation that sold a minority float and kept the Arison family in control.

The company's own investor FAQ records the initial public offering on 31 July 1987 at 3.875 dollars a share after two later two-for-one splits.

That split-adjusted figure is 15.50 dollars on the 1987 tape.

A June 1987 Cruise Industry News report on the forthcoming prospectus said the line expected to offer about 18 percent of the company, or 23.6 million shares, in a 14-to-17-dollar range.

After the sale about 135 million shares would be outstanding.

Salomon Brothers analyst Harvey Katz later told the same paper that Carnival opened at 15.50 dollars.

The company's archived corporate timeline said the sale generated approximately 400 million dollars in 1987 currency.

Ted Arison kept roughly three-quarters of the equity.

Two two-for-one splits, distributed 14 December 1994 and 12 June 1998, produced the 3.875-dollar figure the company still quotes.

The mechanism is a family cruise operator selling a public minority so it could retire shipyard debt and buy rival lines without giving up control.

The later dual-listed Carnival plc structure, unwound on 7 May 2026 when Carnival plc holders received one Carnival Corporation Ltd. share for each plc share, is a different tape event on the same CCL line.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where CCL prints. 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.