Quiet Market Entrance for Amplify With IPO

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

This 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.

ALSO READ: 5 Analyst Stock Picks From July That Could Double

The SkinnyPop brand, established in 2010, embodies the 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. Amplify believes SkinnyPop continues to take meaningful market share from a variety of sizable sub-segments of the overall U.S. salty snack segment.

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

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.

Shares of Amplify were at $16.40 on Wednesday afternoon, and more than 9 million shares had moved.

ALSO READ: 6 Big Stocks With Massive Upside In Analyst Calls