Centuri Holdings, Inc. (CTRI), a unit of Southwest Gas Holdings Inc. (SWX), priced its IPO at $21.00 – the top of its $18.00-to-$21.00 range – on Wednesday night (April 17, 2024) and sold 12.4 million shares – the number in the prospectus – to raise $260.4 million. Shares of Centuri shot up 13.1 percent to open at $23.75 – up $2.75 from their IPO price – at around 11:49 a.m. EDT on Thursday (April 18, 2024) in their debut on the New York Stock Exchange. (Editor’s Note: This column, initially published Wednesday night, April 17, 2024, was updated on Thursday, April 18, with news on Centuri’s debut on the NYSE.)
UBS Investment Bank, BofA Securities, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo Securities were the joint book-runners.
“This is a plain vanilla deal with maybe a little extra chocolate sauce on top,” a veteran IPO trader says. “It should work.”
IPO investors like Carl Icahn’s connection to the deal. Two Icahn limited partnerships had agreed to buy 2.59 million shares at a price equal to the IPO price in a concurrent private placement, the prospectus says.
Southwest Gas Holdings Inc. (SWX), the parent of Centuri Holdings, sold all the shares in the IPO. After the IPO and the concurrent private placement, Southwest Gas Holdings will still own about 82.7 percent of Centuri’s outstanding stock, the prospectus says.
Centuri Holdings, based in Phoenix, is a leading pure-play North American utility infrastructure services company with over 110 years of operating history. Centuri partners with regulated utilities to maintain, upgrade and expand the energy network that powers millions of homes and businesses, the prospectus says.
“We are a leader in utility infrastructure services,” Centuri says in the prospectus.
“Our customers are leading electric, gas and combination utility companies across North America, including American Electric Power, Enbridge, Entergy, Exelon, NiSource, National Grid, Sempra Energy and Southern Company, among others,” the prospectus says.
Financial statements in the prospectus show that Centuri reported a net loss of $0.19 million on $2.9 billion of revenue for the fiscal year that ended Dec. 31, 2023.
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