William HoffmanFitness equipment and training platform iFIT filed for an initial public offering on Tuesday looking to prove that at-home workout trends are not just a pandemic trend.
The Utah-based company was formerly named ICON Health & Fitness but changed its names just last month ahead of its IPO announcement. The company sells a wide range of at-home fitness equipment including treadmills, ellipticals, bikes and rowers from its brands NordicTrack, Pro-Form, Freemotion and Matrix.
iFIT also created its own proprietary app that integrates with the equipment to track workouts and deliver consumers a wide range of available live streamed or recorded classes.
Valuation
Home workouts grew tremendously during the pandemic as gyms closed their doors and consumers looked for safe alternatives to stay in shape.
Indeed, premium fitness equipment maker Peloton raised US$1.16bn in an initial public offering in late 2019 at a price of $29 a share, only to see that price grow to over $160 earlier this year. Peloton is currently trading just over $100 a share.
iFIT did not indicate how many shares it would sell or a price range but was recently valued at over $7bn in its most recent funding round from late 2020 and is expected to attain a valuation in excess of that in its IPO, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In July, iFIT sought to further increase its valuation with the acquisition of Sweat, a women’s Fitness app founded in 2015 that offers 5,000 workouts across 26 exercise programs.
Sales growth
The company amassed 1.1 million subscribers on its platform as of May, up from just 103,000 in 2017, iFIT noted in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
iFIT also hosted 112 million workouts in fiscal 2021, a 229% increase over 2020 when the company hosted 34.1 million workouts.
In fiscal 2021, the company generated $1.745bn in revenue up 21% from the same period last year when iFIT generated $851m.
While the company has benefitted greatly from the stay-at-home trends of the pandemic, it also highlighted the risks of those trends reversing as the economy recovers.
“While we have experienced a significant increase in our member base since the start of the global pandemic, it remains uncertain how the global pandemic will impact consumer demand for our products and services and consumer preferences generally and the effect on demand following the pandemic,” the company stated in its filing.
Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities and Barclays Capital are lead underwriters on the deal.
