New York, May 19, 2026, 19:05 (EDT)
Viavi Solutions Inc. shares fell in late trading Tuesday after the network-test and optical technology company said it planned to sell about $500 million of common stock, a deal aimed mainly at paying down debt but likely to add new shares to the market. Viavi announced the offering at 4:05 p.m. ET, just after the regular Nasdaq session ended.
The timing mattered. Google Finance showed Viavi at $45.79 in after-hours trading, down 7.1%, after the stock closed the regular session at $49.28, off 0.9%. After-hours trading is the lower-volume session after the 4 p.m. market close, where prices can move sharply on fresh company news.
The proposed sale is an underwritten public offering, meaning investment banks will market and sell the new shares. Viavi said Stifel and Needham & Company are joint book-running managers, with UBS Investment Bank also acting as a bookrunner.
For shareholders, the trade-off is clear enough: less debt, but more stock. That can cause dilution, or a smaller ownership slice for existing holders, if new shares are issued.
A preliminary SEC prospectus showed Viavi plans to offer shares with an aggregate public offering price of $500 million and gave underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to another $75 million of stock. The filing listed Viavi’s May 18 closing price at $49.75 but left the final offering price blank; at that prior close, the base offering would equal roughly 10.1 million shares before any extra option or pricing discount.
Viavi said it plans to use net proceeds to repay the $450 million principal amount of its Term Loan B, an institutional loan facility. The SEC filing said that loan matures in October 2032 and carries floating-rate interest tied to SOFR, a benchmark rate used to price many dollar loans, plus a margin.
On a pro forma basis, after the offering and repayment, Viavi’s total indebtedness would fall to $650 million from $1.10 billion as of March 28, while cash and equivalents would rise to $534 million from $499 million, the prospectus table showed. Stockholders’ equity would rise to $1.33 billion from $847 million.
The financing comes after a sharp improvement in Viavi’s latest quarterly sales. The company reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $406.8 million, up 42.8% from a year earlier, and Chief Executive Oleg Khaykin said performance “exceeded our expectations,” citing data center and aerospace-and-defense demand. PR Newswire
Those end markets are why investors also watch Keysight Technologies in test equipment and Ciena and Lumentum in adjacent networking and optical gear. But Tuesday’s late move in Viavi looked more company-specific: the offering landed after a regular session in which broader U.S. indexes were already lower, with the Nasdaq down 0.8%.
Viavi has also been leaning into higher-speed network validation. In a May 5 product release for its CyberFlood CF1000 appliance, Dell’Oro Group’s Mauricio Sanchez said platforms that test security and application infrastructure at scale are becoming “an essential part” of next-generation network deployment. PR Newswire
Separately, Viavi filed an 8-K on Monday saying Joanne Solomon became chair of the audit committee, replacing Donald Colvin, who remains an independent board and audit committee member. The filing said Doug Gilstrap was appointed to the corporate development committee.
But the deal is not done. Viavi said there was no assurance the offering would be completed, or on what size or terms, and the prospectus warned that investors may face dilution and that the stock price could be volatile or fall. A weak market or a discounted offering price could keep pressure on the shares even if the loan repayment improves the balance sheet.
