Oatly goes public: 10 billion dollars for oat milk?

The Swedish oat drink manufacturer Oatly wants to go public in New York and raise up to 1.65 billion US dollars. Oatly would then have a stock market value of 10 billion dollars, which would be 8.2 billion euros. Oatly announced that, together with its investors, it wants to offer up to 96 million shares at a price between 15 and 17 US dollars. That would be up to 1.63 billion US dollars, which would bring the total value of the company to 10 billion dollars, according to media reports.

Quite a lot for a food manufacturer that last year had a worldwide turnover of 421 million US dollars and made a loss of 60 million euros, as finanzen.net writes. For 2021, the group is aiming to double its turnover to up to 800 million US dollars and to grow above all in the USA and China.

According to Finanzen.net, one third of the shares to be sold come from investors such as talk show host Oprah Winfrey and rapper Jay Z, who joined Oatly last year. Two thirds of the shares come from a capital increase, which means fresh money for the company's expansion. The IPO is to be organised by the banks J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.

Oatly - the corporate anti-corporation

Oatly likes to pretend it is Swedish-independent. "If we had an old man behind a wooden desk in a tall building making decisions for us, we would all quit our jobs," it says on the company's international website. The German website lists the investors who own Oatly: mostly old gentlemen who make their money work for them.

Verlinvest and China Ressources will remain the majority shareholder after the IPO. The investment company of the owners of the brewery giant Anheuser-Busch InBev and the Chinese state-owned company joined Oatly in 2016. The investment fund of the Dutch Rabo Bank and the investment fund Blackstone are also involved.

After the entry of Blackstone and investors like Oprah Winfrey in July 2020, the value of Oatly had risen to two billion US dollars. Nine months later, it could be five times higher - if the issue prices remain as they are and the share price does not collapse afterwards. There had already been calls for a boycott in the summer of 2020 because of Blackstone's entry.