CEO: OrthoPediatrics IPO Will Accelerate Growth
The chief executive officer of Warsaw-based OrthoPediatrics Corp. (Nasdaq: KIDS) says last week’s Initial Public Offering was more than a year in the making. Mark Throdahl says going public was necessary in order to maintain OrthoPediatrics’ growth rate of 20 percent or more each year, a mark it has hit for the past six years.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Throdahl said the IPO marks a maturing point for the company "in terms of the ability to continue, if not to slightly accelerate, this growth rate that we’ve been on for some years, to increase the number of instrument sets, to increase the investment that we make in the pace of new product development. All of this can now just accelerate and I think that it will further strengthen our leadership position in pediatric orthopedics."
OrthoPediatrics offered four million shares at an initial price of $13 per share, raising $52 million. Throdahl says he is hopeful that the capital infusion from the IPO will lead the company cash flow profitability over the next several years, allowing the company to become self-sufficient and generate its own cash.
Throdahl says part of the capital raised through the IPO will be used to boost the number of pediatric orthopedic instrument sets that are consigned to hospitals throughout the world. He says plans for six new instrument sets are in the works and the investment required to support them is growing rapidly.
"We would plan to take our capital investment in instrument sets that are consigned up from about $3.5 million a year to about $10 million a year as a result of this IPO, so that will be a tripling of our annual investment in these consigned sets in hospitals both here and abroad."
Throdahl says the company initially wanted to go public last year but, due to market uncertainties related to Brexit and the U.S. presidential election as well as the market conditions for IPOs becoming "very negative," they decided to wait. He says OrthoPediatrics is the first medical device IPO to go out in at least 15 months.
Throdahl says going public marks a maturing point for the company.