How Analysts Rate Amplify Snack Brands After the Quiet Period

The stock priced its IPO at $18 per share, above its expected range of $14 to $16. However shares entered the market at $17 and promptly rose to $17.20. Since that time shares have slowly dropped over the course of August, hitting a post-IPO low just last Thursday.

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.

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.

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The underwriters for the offering were Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, Credit Suisse, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, William Blair and Piper Jaffray. The analysts weighed in on the company as follows:

• Goldman Sachs started it as Neutral with an $18 price target (versus a $13.31 close).
• William Blair started it as Outperform.
• Piper Jaffray started it as Overweight with an $18 price target.
• SunTrust initiated coverage with a Buy rating and an $18 price target.
• Jefferies initiated coverage with a Buy rating and an $18 price target.

Shares of Amplify were up just a penny at $13.32 early Monday afternoon. The stock has a post-IPO trading range of $12.03 to $17.20.