LV-based Valley Bancorp begins trading on Nasdaq

Kevin Rademacher

Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004 | 11:02 a.m.

At 8:15 a.m. this morning, Valley Bancorp Chief Executive Barry Hulin's cell phone rang, and the voice on the other end of the line made it official -- the Las Vegas-based holding company was publicly traded.

With an initial public stock offering worth $16.7 million, Valley Bancorp, which has Valley Bank branches in Henderson, Las Vegas and Pahrump, hit the Nasdaq National Market under the ticker symbol "VLLY."

Not only was Valley Bancorp publicly traded, in early action at least, its 925,000 shares were popular.

The initial price per share had been announced at $18, but it opened at $23.50. An hour after it opened, the stock was still up nearly 20 percentat $21.50.

Barry Hulin, the bank's chief executive, said the surge was a positive sign.

"I'm delighted with how it worked out," he said this morning.

UNLV finance professor Paul Thistle said the initial success of the stock offering was encouraging given the general apprehension in such moves since the stock investors turned their backs on the rush of new companies amid the fall of the dot-com craze.

"I would say the market is still probably a little soft," he said.

The parent company is expected to retain as much as $2 million from the stock offering with the remainder going back to Valley Bank, documents filed in July with the Securities and Exchange Commission said. The bank will use the additional proceeds to "support the continued growth of the business operations and for general corporate purposes," documents said.

The bank also will use the money to back larger lending programs with its existing customers and expanding its presence in the Las Vegas market, Hulin said.

"In a sense, as a publicly traded company, now the hard work begins," he said. "Now we have to follow through and grow the business."

SEC documents said the expansion plans could include "selective acquisitions," but the documents indicated that there are definitive plans for such moves.

Valley Bank is now one of just three local community banks that are publicly traded. Silver State Bancorp, which has nine local Silver State Bank branches, and Business Bank Corp., which has three local Business Bank of Nevada branches, are both traded on the OTC Bulletin Board.

Hulin said the stock offering was needed in order to keep pace with the growth of the quickly expanding local economy.

"What we have all been faced with in such a rapidly growing market are capital constraints," he said. "About every 20 months, we would run out of capital."

Since the bank was formed in 1998, Hulin said additional private stock offerings were made in 2001 and 2003 in order to keep growing.

"As part of our strategic planning, we had to ask where we were going," he said. "We can't stop everything every 18 months and figure out how we are going to raise capital."