Amplify Sets Expected Price Range for IPO

By Chris Lange Published Jul 24, 11:55AM EDT

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Amplifiy Snack Brands Inc. filed an amended S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its initial public offering (IPO). The expected price range for the offering is $14 to $16 for 15.0 million shares, with an overallotment option for an additional 2.250 shares. At the maximum price, the total offering is valued at $276 million. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BETR.

The underwriters for the offering are Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, Credit Suisse, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, William Blair and Piper Jaffray.

This is a high-growth snack-food company is focused on developing and marketing products that appeal to consumers’ growing preference for better-for-you (BFY) snacks. Its anchor brand, SkinnyPop, is a rapidly growing, highly profitable and market leading BFY ready-to-eat popcorn brand.

In April 2015, Amplify acquired Paqui, an emerging BFY tortilla chip brand that has many of the same key taste and BFY attributes as SkinnyPop. Paqui allows the company to leverage its infrastructure to help it grow into an adjacent snacking sub-segment with a second innovative BFY brand. Amplify believes that its focus on building a portfolio of exclusively BFY snack brands differentiates it and will allow it to leverage its platform to realize material synergies across its family of BFY brands, as well as allow our retail customers to consolidate their vendor relationships in this large and growing category.

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In the filing, Amplifiy detailed its position and finances as follows:

Our SkinnyPop brand, established in 2010, embodies our BFY mission while also providing rapid revenue and earnings growth, robust and steady margins, and strong cash flows to help facilitate further investments in organic and inorganic growth opportunities. We believe SkinnyPop continues to take meaningful market share from a variety of sizeable sub-segments of the overall U.S. salty snack segment, although the brand competes most directly in the RTE popcorn sub-segment of salty snacks. The overall U.S. popcorn sub-segment is estimated at $1.9 billion in 2014 and grew 8.1% over the prior year. The $966 million RTE popcorn sub-segment is the fastest growing sub-segment within U.S. salty snacks, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 14.6% since 2010. Within RTE popcorn, SkinnyPop was the fastest growing brand of scale in 2014, increasing its share of the sub-segment by 6.5 percentage points to 12.1% and accounting for more than 40% of total sub-segment growth. SkinnyPop’s growth has been driven by continued gains in both distribution and sales velocity. Between 2012 and 2014, SkinnyPop’s sales velocity accelerated from $48 to $141, even as ACV increased from 17% to 52% over the same period, underscoring the brand’s ability to grow store level productivity even as we increased the number of retail locations where SkinnyPop is available.

The company will receive no proceeds from the offering, but the selling shareholders will. Those selling shareholders do include a few board members.

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About the Author Chris Lange →

Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics.

Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications.

A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.