Wall Street didn’t find Playboy Group Inc. (NASDAQ:PLBY) particularly sexy Thursday, with stock of the iconic adult-oriented brand sinking on its first trading day after returning to public markets for the first time since 2011.
PLBY, which went public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., saw its shares fall to $13.22 on the Nasdaq, down 0.9% from MCAC’s closing price the day before.
However, Playboy CEO Ben Kohn told Seeking Alpha prior to the stock’s opening that he doesn’t worry about the shares’ day-to-day moves, even though he’s a major shareholder in the newly public firm.
“I personally don’t look at the stock price on a daily basis [because] I don’t care about it,” he said. “What we need to focus on as a team is continuing to deliver or over-deliver on what we’ve told the investors.”
Kohn, a former private-equity executive, helped take the company private as has retooled it since taking over for late founder Hugh Hefner, who died in 2017.
PLBY stopped publishing its printed magazine last year, and while it still offers adult content online, Kohn has refocused the company on selling Playboy-branded consumer goods.
“People immediately have this preconceived notion that this is a legacy media business, [but] we’ve cut all of that down,” the CEO said. “This is a vibrant, fast-growing consumer-product company.”
As Kohn told Seeking Alpha in an exclusive interview ahead of the stock’s opening, the company and its licensees currently sell $3 billion a year of Playboy-branded products, from clothing to ashtrays to condoms. Partners and licensees also operate everything from a Playboy casino in London to a Playboy clothing brand in China that has 2,500 brick-and-mortar stores.
The firm aims to succeed in four verticals that Kohn said each have the potential to produce billions of dollars in annual revenue: sexual wellness, style and apparel, gaming/lifestyle and beauty/grooming products.
“When I look at the amount of white space that we have across the four multibillion-dollar, high-growth categories we play in, that’s what’s so exciting,” the CEO said.
Kohn also sees the stock as fairly valued against its closest competitors, privately held Roman or publicly traded Hims & Hers Health Inc. (NYSE:HIMS). Those companies prescribe and sell pharmaceuticals online that consumers could find embarrassing to buy in person, like generic Viagra.
The CEO said that while Roman is valued at about 20x revenue, Playboy’s SPAC deal priced his company at roughly 10.5x EBITDA.
And as for Hims & Hers, Kohn said that’s “a great business, but they’re spending tens of millions of dollars trying to build a brand and trying to acquire customers. [We] reach 50M people every single day through [our] social-media channels.”
You can read more of Kohn’s remarks to Seeking Alpha here.
(Editor's note: An earlier version of this article showed PLBY's preliminary closing price rather than its final closing price.)