Tucson's Mister Car Wash shines in debut on NYSE

Tucson-based Mister Car Wash Inc. shone brightly in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, with its stock jumping 35% on its first day of trading.

Company president and CEO John Lai rang the opening NYSE bell at 6:30 a.m. Arizona time. Mister Car Wash stock (MCW) opened at an initial public offering price of $15 per share, then shot up to nearly $22 before closing the day at $20.30, up $5.30 or 35%.

Lai said the company was thrilled with the IPO results and described ringing the NYSE bell flanked by a dozen company colleagues as a “beyond cool, surreal” experience.

“It was a dream come true on many levels and something I’ll never forget,” said Lai, who started with Mister Car Wash in 2002. He credited the company’s employees for its success and recalled how he became teary-eyed at seeing the company’s logo banner behind the NYSE dais.

“We had 13 people up there but I wish we had 6,000,” Lai said, referring to the company’s approximate employee count in the 21 states it serves. “The people on the dais were the least important, starting with me.”

Mister Car Wash, now trading under the ticker symbol MCW, was 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 of $15 to $17 per share.

At the offering price of $15, the company raised $468.8 million in an IPO led by underwriters — investment houses that buy initial shares in bulk for resale — BofA Securities, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Jefferies.

The IPO price translates to an initial company valuation of $5.6 billion, which Lai said likely places Mister Car Wash in the top 20 of Arizona-based public companies based on market capitalization.

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Mister Car Wash is the only Tucson-based company on the New York Stock Exchange.

“We’re extremely proud to represent Tucson and the great state of Arizona, as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange,” Lai said. “For us, it’s beyond a rite of passage, it’s a validation of all the years of hard work and really underscores our growth potential.”

“Helping Tucson create a stronger and more diverse economic base is good for our entire city, so we’re happy that in one small way we’re contributing to that dynamic,” said Lai, a University of Arizona alumnus who sits on the Southern Arizona Leadership Council.

Looking ahead, Lai said, Mister Car Wash plans to continue an aggressive program of acquiring smaller car-wash chains.

He noted that even though his company is the industry’s biggest with more than 340 company-built and acquired locations, it still only has 5% of the highly fragmented market so there’s plenty of room for growth.

The company remains focused on the conveyor car washes, where customers stay in their cars and a conveyor belt moves the car through the wash at a set speed.

Known for its “Hotshine” process, hot wax applied in a sheet over cars at the end of a wash, Mister Car Wash’s latest prototype company-built wash, like one opened on South Kino Parkway in 2019, can smoothly wash up to 185 cars per hour, Lai said.

Members of the company’s monthly-fee “unlimited wash club” are able to swipe electronic cards to enter and exit in a sparkling clean car in about 3 minutes, he noted.