With an eye on acquisitions, IT provider Science Applications International Corporation said Thursday it would make a public offering of stock in 2006.
The employee-owned San Diego company aims to raise $1.7 billion with the offering. With revenue in 2004 of $7.2 billion and a net income of $409 million, SAIC is one of the largest information technology providers to the U.S. federal government. In 2004, it won $2.5 billion in contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense, making it the ninth-largest Pentagon contractor.
U.S.SAIC is looking ahead to a time when the Pentagon’s annual budget stops growing by as much as 5 percent, as it did between 2005 and 2006 when the White House asked Congress for $419 billion, said Paul Nisbet, an analyst with JSA Research. “One way to combat a period of lesser growth is through acquisitions,” he said.
Founded in 1969 by a group of scientists, SAIC has 43,000 employees in 150 cities across the world. Just about any sort of information technology company could find itself the target of an SAIC acquisition.
The scope of its various businesses is nearly as far-flung as the geography of its operations. The company builds everything from small unmanned helicopters to ruggedized network servers for use in the battlefield. Its offering of IT services ranges from data mining for the U.S. Army and National Guard to outsourcing.