Grocery Outlet Jumps in Debut After Raising $378 Million

(Bloomberg) -- Grocery Outlet Holding Corp. rose in its trading debut after raising $378 million in an above-range initial public offering.

The discount supermarket chain’s shares, which rose as much as 43% Thursday, closed up 30% to $28.51, valuing the company at $2.44 billion.

Grocery Outlet sold 17.2 million shares for $22 each on Wednesday after marketing them for $18 to $19. It had earlier targeted a range of $15 to $17.

The Emeryville, California-based company had net income of $15.9 million on revenue of $2.29 billion last year, according to its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Grocery Outlet has more than 300 stores, which carry a limited amount of deeply discounted and ever-changing products that the company scoops up from brand-name manufacturers with excess inventory. It said in its filings that it sees an opportunity to add about 2,000 more stores in the U.S., and potentially as many as 4,800.

“We like adding stores. We like adding products,” Chief Executive Officer Eric Lindberg said in an interview. “We’re really hard-pressed to look across the U.S. and see a town that couldn’t support a Grocery Outlet.”

The company said in a statement that it intends to use the IPO proceeds to repay a term loan outstanding under its second-lien credit agreement and any remainder to repay a portion of a term loan under its first-lien credit agreement.

The offering was led by Bank of America Corp., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Jefferies Financial Group Inc. The shares are trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol GO.

To contact the reporters on this story: Michael Hytha in San Francisco at mhytha@bloomberg.net;Matthew Boyle in New York at mboyle20@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Fournier at efournier5@bloomberg.net, ;Anne Riley Moffat at ariley17@bloomberg.net, Michael Hytha, Jonathan Roeder

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