Shares of group purchasing organization Premier Inc. (NSDQ:PINC) gained nearly 14% in its 1st day of trading yesterday, closing at $30.65 per share after Premier priced the nearly 28.2 million-share offering at $27 apiece, raising $760 million.
Rumors that Charlotte-based Premier would go public circulated for months before the company filed its plans with the SEC in August.
Premier is a GPO aligning about 2,900 community hospitals and 100,000 "alternate" sites of care, encompassing some 400,000 physicians. The group generated about $869.3 million in revenue and $385.1 million in net income during fiscal 2013, according to SEC filings.
It was owned by a consortium of 181 hospitals and healthcare groups, all of which now own Class B shares but continue to own most of the voting rights associated with the company’s stock, according to a regulatory filing.
Premier, which bills itself as "1 of the nation’s largest performance improvement alliances," is most commonly known for its wide-ranging deals for hospital equipment and supplies. The group recently signed new contracts for drug-eluting and traditional stents with Abbott (NYSE:ABT), Boston Scientific (NYSE:BSX) and Medtronic (NYSE:MDT).
The GPO claims to have provided its members with more than $5 billion in savings in fiscal 2012. Premier also maintains deep data stores that in 2012 included information on 25% of U.S. patient discharges, 29% of annual hospital spending, $30 billion worth of annual direct labor expenses, 2.5 million real-time transactions every day and $40 billion in annual purchasing data, according to the filing.
