FORT WORTH, Texas — Yesway is pausing its efforts to go public. The Fort Worth, Texas-based convenience-store chain, which recently reached 425 stores in nine states, had filed a statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the proposed $100 million initial public offering (IPO) of its stock in September 2021.
However, on Dec. 1, the company filed a registration withdrawal request with the SEC saying that it no longer wished to conduct a public offering of securities at this time.
“We have decided not to proceed with an IPO at this time, given current market conditions,” Yesway said in a statement to CSP. “We remain focused on strong execution and growth while serving our customers and supporting their communities, and we continue to be excited about Yesway’s future.”
Yesway’s CEO Tom Trkla told CSP in October that he was encouraged that the markets were beginning to open up, and thought Yesway would be able to launch “very quickly,” even as soon as the end of the year. U.S. IPO volume hit a low point this summer, due to market volatility, inflation and fears of a downturn, Bloomberg reported.
- BW Gas & Convenience Holdings, which owns Yesway and Allsup's, is No. 21 on CSP’s 2022 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
The impetus to go public was the completion of the integration of Yesway with Allsup’s, the Clovis, N.M.-based family-owned c-store chain that Yesway acquired in November 2019, nearly tripling its store count to 403 units at the time, Trkla said. (See more from Trkla and the Yesway team in CSP’s February magazine issue).
Trkla and his team at Beverly, Mass.-based Brookwood Financial Partners, a real-estate and private-equity investment and asset management company, formed BW Gas & Convenience Holdings LLC in 2015 and established its c-store brand, Yesway.
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