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Update 11:35am: Updates with share trading.
Westrock Coffee (NASDAQ:WEST) began trading Monday after completing a de-spac and it also announced new $350 million credit agreement that will help with its expansion plans. Westrock shares climbed 2.6%.
"This is a significant milestone," Westrock CEO Scott Ford told Seeking Alpha in a Zoom interview. "It's not necessarily a destination, but it's a significant milestone to pass on a journey. We literally built the business from scratch into a business that has about billion dollar valuation."
Westrock (WEST) announced that it entered into a new credit agreement that includes a $175 million senior secured first lien term loan facility and a $175 million senior secured first lien revolving credit facility, according to a statement.
"We are off to the races," Ford said. "It's a non traditional SPAC because our PIPE was 100% of the size of the SPAC."
Westrock (WEST), which announced a deal with SPAC Riverview Acquisition to go public in April, is hitting the markets only five months after the agreement was struck, in what appears tobe a quick turnaround in a SPAC space has been very troubled for over the past year.
"We are a profitable business," Ford said. "The recapitalization allows us to pay debt down and build new facilities. We are a very normal business that just happens to be in a transition state."
“If you take what we do and you look at the EBITDA we generate off of all of that and you map that against all our competitor set we came public at a pretty good discount to the weighted average of all of that," Ford told Seeking Alpha.
Westrock Coffee, which started in 2009, currently provides over 20 million cups of coffee to the world daily. The company describes itself as the largest custom/private label coffee and tea provider to restaurants in the U.S. by volume, and the second largest coffee extract provider in ready-to-drink coffee.
“We've got just an unbelievable great opportunity that if we execute on it, some of the most marginalized people in the world can continue to see their incomes doubled and tripled," Ford explained. "That's a win win."