Tucson-based Mister Car Wash Inc. plans to go public on Friday with an initial public stock offering on the New York Stock Exchange.
The company will be the only Tucson-based company on the New York Stock Exchange, since Tucson Electric Power Co. parent UniSource Energy Corp. dropped off the Big Board after being acquired by Fortis Inc. in 2014.
After growing rapidly through a series of acquisitions, Mister Car Wash bills itself as the largest car wash company in the nation, with more than 300 locations and 5,000 employees in 21 states.
Initial public offerings, or IPOs, are the process by which private companies offers new or existing securities to the public for the first time.
Mister Car Wash, which will be traded under the ticker symbol “MCW,” is looking to raise up to $635.7 million in an offering of 37.5 million shares, including about 6 million shares being sold by company shareholders, at a price between $15 and $17 per share.
At that valuation, the company would be worth about $5 billion.
Mister Car Wash estimates it will net about $465 million from the IPO and says it will use it to pay off a $243 million loan and pay off or pay down a second, $222.5 million loan. BofA Securities, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Jefferies are the lead underwriters for the IPO.
The bulk of Mister Car Wash is owned by funds affiliated with the Los Angeles-based private-equity firm Leonard Green & Partners, which acquired the company from an affiliate of Toronto-based Onex Corp. and will own 79% of the company’s public stock and control the company’s board following the offering, the company said in its registration statement.
Tucsonan John Lai, Mister’s CEO, who owns 5.4% of the company’s stock, plans to sell a 1.3% share as part of the IPO.
Mister Car Wash posted net income of $59.3 million on revenue of $574.9 million in 2020, compared with net income of $920,000 on revenue of $629.5 million in 2019. The 2020 results included a $38 million gain on the sale of assets, after the company sold off a string of quick-lube centers to focus on its car-wash business.
The original Mister Car Wash opened in Houston, Texas, in 1969. In 1996, Car Wash Partners was formed by the investment firm Brown, McMillan & Co. to create a nationwide car-wash company through acquisitions. Onex’s ONCAP fund acquired the company in 2007.
By 1999, the company had set up administrative offices in the Foothills, and in 2014 Mister Car Wash moved its headquarters into a renovated 1950s-era church building near downtown at 222 E. Fifth St.
In 2017, Mister Car Wash acquired a second building for corporate operations at 415 N. Sixth Ave.
The company, which has 14 car washes in the Tucson area and one in Sierra Vista, would not comment beyond the IPO filing, citing a regulatory “quiet period” pending approval of its stock registration statement.
If Mister Car Wash’s IPO goes forward as planned, the company will join a handful of Tucson-based public companies traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, including Accelerate Diagnostics, HTG Molecular Diagnostics, Audioeye.
Besides UniSource, several Tucson-based companies have ceased trading after acquisitions, including Ventana Medical Systems, which was acquired by Swiss drug giant Roche in 2008.
Self-driving truck developer TuSimple Holdings, which is based in San Diego but has a major technology development center and freight hub in Tucson, went public on the Nasdaq in April.
