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- Sports nutrition group hopes to raise £340m and £400m from London IPO
- Retail investors can register to buy shares through three platforms
Applied Nutrition hopes to amass a market value of £400 million thanks to an imminent initial public offering of shares in the British sports nutrition group on the London Stock Exchange.
The group, based in Knowsley, Liverpool, said on Wednesday it would offer up to 137,408,477 shares at a price range of 136p to 160p each, implying a value of £340m to £400m.
Applied Nutrition’s IPO, backed by JD Sports, will receive £25 million of support from “four prominent and highly successful businesspeople from the North West”, including Mohsin Issa, who resigned as chief executive of Asda last month.
It hopes to raise £220m in total.
The impending initial public offering (IPO) will mean a windfall worth hundreds of millions of pounds for chief executive Thomas Ryder (pictured).
And retail investors will have the opportunity to participate for a minimum request size of £250, via the AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown and Interactive Investor platforms.
The shares are expected to be admitted to the London Stock Exchange later this month and the deadline for investors to apply to participate on the platforms is 10am on October 23.
Although the maximum fundraising target falls short of the £500m suggested when the IPO was announced earlier this month, it is expected to deliver a windfall for the 55 per cent shareholder, founder and chief executive, Thomas Ryder.
He created Applied Nutrition in 2014 and grew it into a company with more than 200 employees that sells products from herbal powders and tablets to isotonic gels in more than 80 countries.
The company is backed by JD Sports, which bought a 32 per cent stake from Ryder, 40, in 2021, and is the official nutrition partner of football clubs Fulham and Glasgow Rangers.
Revenue topped £86m in the 12 months to the end of July (up from £35m in 2022 and £61m in 2023), while profits hit £26m .
The IPO comes at an important time for London stock markets, which have grappled with a dearth of listing activity, as well as a number of UK-listed companies being bought out or defecting to foreign markets.
Analysts at Peel Hunt said: ‘Applied Nutrition has seen meteoric growth over the last three years, lifting revenue from £22m in FY21 to £86m in FY24.
‘EBITDA margins have remained firm at (approximately) 30 percent, more than double those of competitors.
‘Applied Nutrition runs an extremely efficient operation, with marketing costs, distribution costs and other administrative costs all significantly below its peers, due to its third-party distributor-focused sales model.
“Maintaining margins assumes the business is fully invested in growth and does not imply any significant shift in sales mix towards D2C, areas we believe potential investors should explore.”
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