Finance History|11 Wall Street — Twenty Dollars for Eighteen Percent of a Lens Shop

People treat Cooper Companies as a San Ramon contact-lens house that always printed COO on Nasdaq.

The 1983 issuer was CooperVision, a subsidiary of Cooper Laboratories, not the later parent name.

Parker Montgomery had built Cooper Labs as a public incubator. In January 1983 he sold 18 percent of CooperVision, then a contact-lens and ophthalmic-supply book with about 195 million dollars of annual sales.

Company-history accounts drawing on Fortune of 8 August 1983 recorded the price at 20 dollars a share, about 27 times the subsidiary's 1982 earnings, and cash to the parent of about 60 million dollars in 1983 currency.

Market-data services that track the surviving line date first trade to 21 January 1983. The New York Stock Exchange later marked a 35th listing anniversary in December 2018, when Albert G. White III rang the opening bell.

The parent took the name The Cooper Companies in 1987. On 26 September 2023 the common left the New York Stock Exchange and opened on Nasdaq under the same ticker COO.

The mechanism is a partial subsidiary offering. The parent kept control and raised cash against a lens book that later became the whole company.

Holders in 1983 bought an 18 percent slice of CooperVision, not a fertility-device line. CooperSurgical arrived as a later chapter.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where the 1983 line printed and where COO last traded in 2023. 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.