Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Fifty-Eight Million Shares and a German Parent Cash Out

People treat American Water as a Camden waterfront headquarters and the only water utility in the S and P 500.

The 2008 listing was an exit, not a founding.

The operating lineage begins in 1886, when American Water Works and Guarantee Company was organized in Pennsylvania.

By 1914 the firm was American Water Works and Electric, a utility holding company of the kind the Public Utility Holding Company Act later broke apart.

John H. Ware Jr. took the water book public under the ticker AWK in 1947. RWE of Germany bought the company in 2003.

On 22 April 2008 RWE Aqua Holdings priced 58 million shares at 21.50 dollars each, below the original 24-to-26 dollar range and below a later cut to 22-to-23.

The sale raised about 1.25 billion dollars in 2008 currency. All of the offered stock came from the selling shareholder. None of the cash went into American Water's own accounts.

Trading began on the New York Stock Exchange on 23 April 2008 under AWK. After the sale RWE still held about 64 percent, assuming the underwriters left the option unexercised.

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch ran the books.

The mechanism is a regulated water holding company used as a foreign parent's cash box. Rate cases and a weak IPO market set the price. The pipes did not move.

Headquarters in 2008 sat in Voorhees, New Jersey. The Camden building at 1 Water Street opened a decade later.

The pin is the public Broad Street facade of the Exchange. Do not treat the floor as open.

Photo: Arild Vagen, 16 August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.