Impsat Fiber Networks

» see impsat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Impsat sold bandwidth to companies, which is why almost nobody outside Latin America has heard of it, and it was registered with the SEC, which is why every number in this entry has a filing behind it. It began in Argentina in 1990 as IMPSAT S.A., part of the Pescarmona industrial group out of Mendoza, and its first metropolitan network went into Buenos Aires that same year. Colombia followed in 1991 and Venezuela in 1992. By the end of 1992 it had 125 corporate customers in two countries.

The expansion ran on the same pattern for a decade. A Delaware holding company called IMPSAT Corporation was organized in 1994 to put the existing national businesses under one roof; Ecuador arrived the same year, a US arm in 1995, Brazil in 1998, Chile and Peru in 2001. The name changed to IMPSAT Fiber Networks, Inc. in January 2000 and the shares went public on Nasdaq in February, one month before the Nasdaq peak.

It did not survive what arrived next. The es.wikipedia account puts it plainly: the debts were already heavy, the dot-com collapse took the share price, and the Argentine economic crisis of the early 2000s finished the arithmetic. On 11 June 2002 the company filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition in New York's Southern District. The plan went in on 4 September, the court confirmed it by order of 16 December, and it became effective on 25 March 2003. Pescarmona lost the company to the people it owed money to.

The company that emerged was smaller and tidier, and it spent four years being rebuilt for sale. Global Crossing agreed to buy it on 25 October 2006, the shareholders voted yes on 17 January 2007, and the deal closed on 9 May. The next day the registrant filed a Form 15 listing three holders of record.

~ the dossier ~

~ eight countries ~

The last annual report Impsat ever filed is a useful document because it stops pretending. For the year to 31 December 2006 it booked $285.0 million of net revenues, up from $254.0 million in 2005 and $227.7 million in 2004, and it counted 4,718 corporate customers across eight countries against the 125 it had in 1992. It employed 1,251 people, of whom 445 sat in Argentina and 250 in Colombia. It ran fifteen metropolitan area networks over more than 1,000 route kilometers of fiber and microwave, reaching cities from Córdoba and Medellín to Curitiba, Caracas, Guayaquil and Lima.

None of that was a consumer business. Impsat sold data transmission and data-center capacity to large institutional buyers, and the thing it was actually selling was the absence of an outage in a region where outages were normal. Its slogan was "Think Ahead", printed in English in countries where English is not the working language. The customer it was addressing is not hard to identify.

~ the bondholders took it ~

Clarín ran the Argentine version of the story in March 2002 under a headline that translates to "Pescarmona lost Impsat", followed the next day by "Impsat's creditors keep the company". Both are accurate. The group that had built the thing over twelve years put it into a New York bankruptcy court and the holders of its debt came out owning it. An Argentine industrial family lost a continental network inside an American courtroom.

The emerged company kept the same chief executive, Ricardo Verdaguer, and traded on the Nasdaq Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board rather than the exchange proper. Public float at the middle of 2006 was about $61.2 million. A class action over the February 2000 IPO was still outstanding; under the plan the plaintiffs took their claim into the reorganization along with everyone else.

~ what global crossing bought ~

Global Crossing's press release of 10 May 2007 put the total transaction value at $347 million, made up of roughly $95 million in equity and $252 million of debt either assumed or paid off. Shareholders got $9.32 in cash per share. "Today we're proud to be closing our acquisition of Impsat," said John Legere, who was running Global Crossing at the time, and the release noted the company had also just completed a $250 million term loan to help pay for it.

For a while the name survived as administrative furniture. Global Crossing reorganized its reporting into three segments, one of which was called GC Impsat, and Impsat's results were consolidated from 9 May 2007 forward. That is the usual afterlife for an acquired carrier: the brand stops being a company and becomes a column heading, and then Level 3 bought Global Crossing in 2011 and even the column went.

~ think ahead ~

There is one grave on this site that Impsat already touches. Mandic, the Brazilian BBS that became an ISP, was bought outright by Impsat in 1999 with around 110,000 users, folded into a portal called O Site, and quietly absorbed when the portal failed. That is the only consumer-facing thing Impsat is remembered for in the region, and the memory belongs to Mandic rather than to the buyer.

The rest of it was infrastructure, and infrastructure is written about by its customers or not at all. The es.wikipedia article on a company with 1,251 employees and a Nasdaq listing runs to about 3,500 bytes, while its own SEC filings run to hundreds of pages. Everything specific in this entry came from the filings, because the filings are the only place where somebody was legally required to write it down.

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