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PayPal Inc. will again become an independent, publicly traded company under a plan revealed Sept. 30 by eBay Inc. some 13 years after the online payments company's fleeting stint on Wall Street.
The split, which will take the form of a tax-free spinoff to eBay shareholders, is expected to close in the second half of 2015, subject to market, regulatory and certain other conditions.
Shares of PayPal began trading on the Nasdaq National Market in February 2002 after it sold 6.21 million shares of common stock at an initial public offering price of $13 apiece. The modestly sized $80.7 million offering, which had been sold through a syndicate of underwriters managed by Salomon Smith Barney Inc., Bear Stearns & Co. Inc., William Blair & Co. LLC, SunTrust Capital Markets Inc. and Friedman Billings Ramsey & Co. Inc., had been followed more than four months later by a $108.3 million secondary offering by a group of selling shareholders that most notably included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Thiel Capital Management LLC managing member and then-PayPal Chairman, President and CEO Peter Thiel. Less than two weeks after that offering closed, eBay revealed its agreement to acquire PayPal in an all-stock transaction that the parties initially valued at $1.5 billion.
"We had negotiations about this transaction that started after the secondary and we concluded that this was the right step for both companies," Thiel said during a July 8, 2002, conference call, according to a transcript of his remarks. A registration on Form S-4 filed by eBay in August 2002 would later reveal that PayPal and eBay had first discussed a potential transaction in November 2000 and that the two parties had held various talks about a combination thereafter. The July 2002 agreement, however, came together quickly, with eBay providing PayPal with...