Tickets.com Boosts Range of Imminent IPO

Costa Mesa-based Tickets.com Inc. on Wednesday significantly raised the price range for its initial public offering amid growing optimism about the online ticket seller’s stock market debut.

Tickets.com (ticker symbol: TIXX), which provides tickets online for sports and entertainment events, increased the range for its offering of 6.7 million shares from $7 to $9 a share to $10 to $12 per share in hopes of raising as much as $80.4 million. Executives said the offering might happen as early as today.

In June, the company said it hoped to generate as much as $75 million with its first stock offering, but that was reduced to $56.3 million in September after the company received an $85-million investment from Excite@Home and Cox Interactive Media.

Company officials declined to comment on what led them to increase their offering range, but usually such an action demonstrates high demand for an issue.

In the first nine months of this year, Tickets.com lost $38.2 million and had revenue of $33.1 million. The company said it will use part of the proceeds of the offering to repay about $20.4 million in long-term debt as well as for working capital.

The company is still embroiled in a legal dispute with rivals Ticketmaster Corp. and Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch, which sued Tickets.com in July over its practice of linking Internet consumers to internal pages within Ticketmaster’s Web site and using the Ticketmaster name on the Tickets.com site.

The lawsuit also alleges that Tickets.com provided false and misleading information about the availability of tickets. In September, Tickets.com filed a motion to have the suit dismissed, arguing that the linking practice is inherent to the Internet. The suit is pending.