Accelerated Networks Planning Stock Offering

Telecom in general continues to attract hoards of investment dollars. A hot new stock offering that will begin trading today: Net2000 Communications (ticker symbol: NTKK), a broadband services provider. It sold 10 million shares at $20 a share late Monday.

Among upcoming deals, Accelerated Networks, a 4-year-old Moorpark-based maker of telecommunications equipment for carrying voice and data traffic on a single broadband network, filed a registration statement Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $64 million in an initial stock offering.

Accelerated’s products are used to bundle a range of red-hot services, including high-speed Internet access, local and long-distance phone service, and virtual private networks, helping the company to $8.5 million in annual sales last year. It closed 1999 with a loss of more than $21 million.

But those losses haven’t scared off private investors, who have pumped about $90 million into the company. A year ago, Accelerated received a $30-million investment from German telecom equipment giant Siemens. Venture capital firms have invested an additional $60 million.

Credit Suisse First Boston will be the lead underwriter on the deal, and Dain Rauscher Wessels and Warburg Dillon Read will co-manage the offering.