Ipo, Initial Public Offering | featured news

A legal challenge to an ambitious plan to let the public buy shares in one of New York City's most famous landmarks — the Empire State Building — was cast aside on Tuesday in a ruling by a Manhattan judge.

The head of Italian automaker Fiat is considering a plan to hold a public stock offering after the company buys 100 percent of Chrysler, according to a person briefed on the matter.

San Francisco-based online real-estate listing firm, Trulia, is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange this coming Thursday, Sept. 20, under the ticker, TRLA, according to a report. The company plans to sell 6 million shares with a price range of between $14 and $16 a share.

China's Alibaba Group said it bought back half the stake Yahoo Inc owned in the company for about $7.6 billion, moving closer to an initial public offering.

Tech investors are sidling up to the bar again after the "Facebook hangover," only this time they are minding their P's and Q's. "In a sense, the tech IPOs are back," said Francis Gaskins, president of IPODesktop.com. Only seven tech or Internet companies have gone public since Facebook's IPO; by comparison, Gaskins said now there are 20 technology companies in the IPO pipeline. The difference is that the offerings are smaller and priced to lure institutional investors rather than emotion-driven retail investors.

Supermarket chain Safeway SWY +4.30% is planning to spinoff its gift-card subsidiary Blackhawk Network with an IPO next year, only months after saying that wasn’t in the cards. The plan, revealed in a short press release with scant details, calls for a minority stake to be sold in Blackhawk.

Trulia, the operator of the Trulia.com real estate website, filed for a public stock offering Friday that could bring the company up to $75 million.

Soccer powerhouse Manchester United is expected to launch its IPO in New York as early as next week, for pricing in early August, after earlier attempts in Hong Kong, Singapore and the UK.

Manchester United filed for an initial public offering in the United States on Tuesday, a move that would return the English soccer team to the public markets. The club set a preliminary fund-raising target of $100 million to determine registration fees. It had previously hoped to raise about $1 billion in either Hong Kong or Singapore. Manchester United had traded on the London Stock Exchange before Malcolm Glazer, an American who also controls the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team, took the company private in a $1.45 billion buyout in 2005.

Kayak Software Corp. slowed its march to the stock market in one of the clearest examples yet of the fallout from Facebook Inc.'s tumultuous initial public offering.