Smithfield Foods (SFD) priced its IPO at $20.00 – $3.00 below the $23.00-to-$27.00 range in the prospectus – and cut the IPO’s size at pricing to about 26.09 million shares – down from 34.8 million shares in the prospectus – to raise $521.74 million on Monday night, Jan. 27, 2025. (This column, published early Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025, was updated to add the stock’s opening trade on the NASDAQ.)
Smithfield, the world’s largest pork producer, and WH Group, the existing shareholder before the IPO, each sold 13.04 million shares in the IPO – to receive proceeds of about $260.9 million apiece. Smithfield will not receive any of the proceeds from the sale of existing shareholder WH Group’s stock.
Smithfield’s stock jumped to open at $21.05 – up $1.05 from its IPO price – in its NASDAQ debut today – Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. The stock later gave up most of that gain to trade slightly above $20.00, its IPO price, in early afternoon trading.
The IPO marks Smithfield Food’s return as a publicly traded company for the first time in more than a decade.
WH Group of Hong Kong acquired Smithfield for $4.7 billion in 2013 in the largest Chinese purchase of a U.S. firm at the time, according to Bloomberg. After the IPO, WH Group will still own a controlling stake in Smithfield.
Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities and Goldman Sachs acted as joint lead book-running managers. Barclays and Citigroup served as joint book-running managers. BNP PARIBAS, HSBC, Rabo Securities and BTIG also were book-running managers, according to Smithfield Foods. PNC Capital Markets was a co-manager.
Smithfield Foods, founded in 1936, is based in Smithfield, Virginia. The company is known for its Smithfield hams and packaged meat products that include well-known brands such as Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and Eckrich sausage.
For the 12 months that ended Sept. 29, 2024, Smithfield earned net income of $450.0 million on revenue of $14.2 billion, according to financial statements in the prospectus.
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