Aveanna clears path for US$90m selldown
Aveanna Healthcare helped facilitate a US$90m secondary selldown of stock by long-time backer JH Whitney by pre-announcing strong quarterly results.
Jefferies, JP Morgan, Barclays and RBC Capital Markets were joint bookrunners on the sale overnight on Tuesday of 10m secondary shares at US$9, the bottom end of the US$9–$9.50 marketing range and a 12% discount to the US$10.23 last sale.
Despite being an all-secondary offering, the banks took the extra precaution of wall-crossing investors ahead of the public launch.
As part of that marketing, the in-home healthcare provider flashed preliminary third-quarter adjusted Ebitda and revenue of US$77m–$81m and US$616m–$624m, well above the US$58.5m and US$578.6m analyst consensus, according to LSEG data.
JH Whitney, which formed Aveanna through a merger with a Bain Capital-backed portfolio company in 2017 before taking the company public in 2021, reduced its Aveanna stake to 19.9% from 24.6%.
While below the US$12 price at which Aveanna went public, the firm has been selling shares on the open market earlier this year at prices ranging from US$5.36 to US$5.89.
As a 10% shareholder, JH Whitney is required to publicly file all sales.
Aveanna turned the corner in the third quarter when it posted adjusted Ebitda of US$88.4m on revenue of US$589.6m, a 15% margin.
The stock sale comes a month after Aveanna refinanced its banks' facilities by taking out US$886m of first-lien loans with new loans that included an upsized US$250m revolving credit facility.