Going public.

• Author: Beck, Bill
• Position: 11 Indiana companies made initial public offerings in 1993 - Includes related article on Indiana's fastest growing companies - Indiana Stocks

It was a record year for IPOs - 11 Indiana companies made initial public offerings in 1993.

Stock-market investors in Indiana heard a lot in 1993 about an acronym that they might not have been all that familiar with in the past.

The IPO--for initial public offering--is a private firm's introduction to the market and the investing public. Normally, only a handful of Indiana companies make initial public offerings in any given year. Not so in 1993, when 11 Indiana companies went public.

All told, a record 819 new issues hit Wall Street during 1993. New issues raised a reported $41 billion during the year, nearly double the previous record. There have been recent years when no Hoosier firms and only a handful of out-of-state companies filed for IPOs.

"1993 was a gangbuster year for IPOs," says Jeff Davis, a securities analyst with the brokerage firm Raffensperger Hughes & Co. in Indianapolis.

Among the Indiana companies that went public during the year were Simon Property Group and Amtran in Indianapolis, Belden Wire & Cable and Stant Corp. in Richmond, Shoe Carnival in Evansville, National Steel in Mishawaka and Starcraft Automotive Corp. in Goshen.

Davis thinks the reason for the rash of IPOs is fairly simple. Wall Street has been enjoying its hottest bull market since the 1960s, and entrepreneurs are seeing the chance to cash out on the work of a lifetime.

"It's been a rambunctious year," says Jim Barnes of the Indianapolis office of McDonald & Co., a Cleveland-based brokerage firm. He agrees that the bull market of recent years is critical to fostering IPOs. "If you're going to raise money through the sale of stock, it's a pretty formidable undertaking. And it all has to be done at once. It takes a lot of money. A bull market is conducive to all that. It facilitates the process. I guess it's the nature of the beast." "It was a big year for equity deals," says Ray Diggle, a securities analyst with the Indianapolis office of Robert W. Baird & Co. "Companies are trying to rebalance the equity sheet to reduce their debt-equity ratios. It's a function of the entrepreneurs trying to get their money out. The impetus was to get some liquidity."

Diggle notes that the jump in IPOs, both in Indiana and in the nation, is "a function of, to some extent, the conservative trend of the 1990s to undo the leveraged buyout mania of the 1980s."

So just who were some of the Indiana companies that floated initial public offerings during the year?

For starters...