PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said Thursday that has filed registration papers with U.S. regulators to take its consulting arm public, confirming industry speculation and paving the way for Wall Street's largest IPO this year.
The blockbuster initial public offering is said to be as much as $9-billion (U.S.), sources familiar with the company's plans recently said. If it does raise that amount, it would more than double the value of the largest IPO to date this year - the $4.3-billion sale of Citigroup Inc.'s C.N Travelers Property Casualty Corp.
The class-A common shares are slated to become available in early August.
The move will create a separate publicly traded company out of PWC Consulting, an industry giant with 33,500 employees and $6.7-billion in fiscal 2001 revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers is the world's biggest accounting firm with 150,000 employees and $23-billion in revenue.
Morgan Stanley is the lead underwriter for the offering, the company said.
New York-based PWC said early this year it planned to spin off its consulting division sometime in the spring, but said its planned move was expedited by troubles dogging rival Big Five accounting firm Andersen.
The move comes as the accounting industry has been rocked by charges of conflicts of interest in the wake of the collapse of Enron Corp., an event that proved hugely damaging to its auditor and consultant, Andersen.
PwC said in January that Andersen's travails and U.S. Congressional scrutiny over accounting industry conflicts spurred its decision to separate its consulting division, which provides strategic and technical advice to many of the world's top companies.
This also comes two years after the company was in advanced, but ultimately fruitless, talks to sell its consulting unit to Hewlett-Packard Co. for about $18-billion. Since then, the general market decline and the relative dearth of new issues prompted underwriters to mark a lower value to the offering, sources said.
An IPO of PwC's consulting unit would come amid a spate of similar moves by rivals. Both Accenture, the former consulting arm of Arthur Andersen, and KPMG Consulting, a former unit of KPMG LLP, went public last year. And Deloitte Consulting recently split from its auditing arm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, but has so far elected to remain private.
PWC said it will change its name and "brand identity." It will announce the changes before the IPO it said.