IPO investors must have worked up an appetite for GEN Korean BBQ. GEN Restaurant Group (GENK), the parent of the GEN Korean BBQ chain, upsized its IPO by 20 percent and priced the deal at $12.00 – the high end of its $10,00-to-$12.00 range – on Tuesday night (June 27, 2023). The IPO was increased to 3.6 million shares, up 600,000 from the 3.0 million shares in the prospectus. GEN Restaurant Group’s IPO raised $43.2 million. The stock sizzled in its NASDAQ debut on Wednesday (June 28, 2023) – jumping 52.5 percent at the opening trade to $18.30 and closing at $15.34 – up 27.8 percent for the day. (Editor’s Note: This column, published Wednesday before the U.S. stock market’s open, was updated later with the stock’s performance in its first day of trading on the NASDAQ.)
Roth Capital Partners was the sole book-runner. Craig-Hallum Group and The Benchmark Company were the co-managers.
GEN Restaurant Group owns and operates 34 GEN Korean BBQ restaurants in seven states – California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, Texas, New York and Florida. The company, based in Cerritos, California, was founded in 2011 by two Korean immigrants, Jae Chang and David Kim. They opened their first GEN Korean BBQ restaurant in Tustin, California, in 2011.
GEN Korean BBQ offers an all-you-can-eat menu that includes beef and pork, poultry, seafood and mixed vegetables. The fast casual dining concept is cook-your-own meal. Diners use the grill embedded in the center of each table. Meals are served family style.
IPO investors warmed to the idea of GEN Restaurant Group’s IPO after the successful NYSE debut of CAVA Group, Inc. (CAVA), the Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant chain, on June 15th. CAVA’s stock ended its first day of trading up 99 percent from its $22.00 IPO price – after rising more than 100 percent during the day (Thursday, June 15, 2023). CAVA’s stock closed on Tuesday, June 27, 2023, at $45.55 – up 107 percent from its IPO price. That performance put CAVA back in the moonshot zone again. (A moonshot occurs when a stock’s price gains at least 100 percent – a doubling in price – on its first day of trading.)
GEN Restaurant Group plans to use some of the IPO’s proceeds for expansion.
For the 12 months that ended March 31, 2023, GEN Restaurant Group earned net income of $11.4 million on revenue of $169.0 million.
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