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- Mattress Firm (MFRM) filed publicly Friday for an IPO that will return the bedding retailer to the public market some six years after it went private at a $3.8B enterprise valuation.
- The chain wrote in an S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that certain of its private investors plan to sell $100M of stock via the initial public offering, although that’s likely just a placeholder number.
- The company – which announced in September that it had confidentially filed to go public – provided few other details about its IPO plan, such as how many shares investors will sell and what price range they expect the stock to fetch.
- However, the chain did say that it intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “MFRM.” That’s the same ticker that Mattress Firm (MFRM) − America’s largest bedding chain by store count − used prior to its exit from the Nasdaq in 2016 after South Africa’s Steinhoff International took the company private.
- Steinhoff offered a 115% premium over where Mattress Firm’s shares had been trading at the time, but the chain struggled once it went private.
- First, Steinhoff suffered from a 2017 accounting scandal that saw its CEO quit. A year later, MFRM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the express purpose of getting out of leases and closing some 700 underperforming stores.
- Mattress Firm (MFRM) ultimately emerged from bankruptcy a few weeks later with about 2,600 outlets, which it’s further trimmed back to roughly 2,350 stores today.
- “Since the beginning of fiscal 2019, we have fundamentally transformed our business across all functions,” the company wrote in Friday’s S-1. “We closed more than 950 stores, [but] estimate that we have been able to recapture a significant share of sales from these closed stores through neighboring locations, as well as online. In addition, over the past three years we negotiated favorable modifications of lease terms for a significant majority of our stores.”
- All in, Mattress Firm (MFRM) reported that net revenues rose 34.9% in its fiscal year ended Sept. 28 to hit about $4.4B. However, higher expenses drove the company to a $165.1M loss during the period vs. a $125.6M profit a year earlier:
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