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Autonomy comes home
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October 31, 2000: 7:37 a.m. ET
Software company makes solid gain on London Stock Exchange debut
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LONDON (CNNfn) - British software company Autonomy Corp, which has seen its stock surge six-fold on Europe's Easdaq in the last 12 months, made a solid debut when it returned home to the London Stock Exchange Tuesday.
The shares jumped about 6 percent, or 194 pence to 3,470 pence in midday trade. The company, which makes software that organizes data on the Internet and can read an email and send it to the right person in an organization, priced its shares at 3,276 pence each.
The London listing raised no new money for the company, but allowed long-term investors to recoup some cash, raising £218 million ($317 million) in total.
The secondary offer was 6-times oversubscribed, leading the shares to trade at some 250 times last year's earnings.
Investors sold about 6.6 million shares, or about 5 percent of the company. Chief Executive Mike Lynch sold a holding worth about $60 million and still own's 18 percent of the company's stock. Most of the shares were sold by venture capital firm Apax Partners, which invested in Autonomy's parent company Neurodynamics back in 1994.
The Cambridge, England-based company counts U.S. technology standard-bearers Oracle Corp (ORCL: Research, Estimates), Sun Microsystems (SUNW: Research, Estimates) and Compaq (CPQ: Research, Estimates) among its customers.
The company could join London's FTSE 100 benchmark index for blue chips in December, given its market value of more than $6 billion. The committee which runs FTSE listings has its next quarterly meeting on Dec. 6 to discuss which stocks are in, or out.
Earlier this year Autonomy also gained a secondary listing on the tech-laden Nasdaq market to raise the company's profile in the United States. It hopes a London listing will do the same for it at home. U.K. investors hold about 30 percent to 40 percent of the company but it is far from a household name. 
-- from staff and wire reports
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Autonomy
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