The largest oat milk company in the world, Oatly, could be going public this weekon Thursday.
The Swedish firm is know for its dairy-alternative products made from oats. The items range from basic oat milk, to even ice cream and yogurt made from oat milk. According to its website, Oatly’s goal is “to make it easy for people to turn what they eat and drink into personal moments of healthy joy without recklessly taxing the planet’s resources in the process.”
Oatly confidentially filed for its IPO back in February, then officiallyset terms of the move last week. According to multiple outlets, Oatly will offer about 84.4 million American depositary shares (ADS) at between $15 and $17 per share. In total, the Oatly IPO could reach a $10.1 billion valuation, and the firm hopes to raise $1.1 billion.
Additionally, Oatly plans to trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker “OTLY” and had nine lead underwriters for its IPO.
The majority shareholder
Oatly was founded in 1994 by Rickard Oste, a professor of food chemistry and nutrition in Sweden, and his brother Bjorn Oste. Working in Malmo, Sweden, they developed a way of processing a slurry of oats and water with enzymes to produce natural sweetness and a milk-like taste and consistency.
Oatly’s image benefited from a roster of celebrity investors, including Oprah Winfrey, Natalie Portman, Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company, and Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks. All have some connection to the plant-based or healthy living movement.
The majority shareholder is a partnership between an entity owned by the Chinese government and Verlinvest, a Belgian firm that invests some of the wealth of the families that control the Anheuser-Busch InBev beer empire. Blackstone, the giant private equity firm, owns a little less than 8 percent in Oatly.
The company’s growth went into overdrive after Verlinvest bought a majority stake in 2016 via a joint venture with China Resources, a state-owned conglomerate with vast holdings in cement, power generation, coal mining, beer, retailing and many other industries. The new financing helped Oatly to expand in Europe and begin exporting to the United States and China, where many people cannot tolerate cow’s milk. China Resources’ involvement undoubtedly helped open doors in the Chinese market. Asia, primarily China, accounted for 18 percent of sales in the first quarter of 2021, and is growing at a rate of 450 percent a year, according to Oatly.
In Europe, there is growing alarm about Chinese investment in strategic industries like autos, batteries and robotics. The European Commission has begun erecting regulatory barriers to companies with financial links to the Chinese government. But so far no one has expressed fear that China will dominate the world’s supply of oat milk.
Just in case, Oatly’s prospectus gives it the option of listing in Hong Kong if the foreign ownership becomes a problem in the United States.
The Key Markets
Oat milk is part of a larger trend toward food that mimics animal products. So-called food tech companies like Beyond Meat have raised a little more than $18 billion in venture funding, according to PitchBook, which tracks the industry. Plant-based dairy, which in the United States includes brands like Ripple (made from peas) and Mooala (bananas), raised $640 million last year, more than double the amount raised a year earlier.
According to the Plant Based Foods Association and Good Foods Institute, plant-based-food sales reached $7 billion in 2020.
Consumer Insights data quoted in the prospectus says the plant-based milk category will grow 20% to 25% over the next three years.
Oatly is focused on its role in helping to transform the food industry in order to be better for the environment and meet the health needs of its customers. The company points out that substituting a cup of Oatly for a cup of cow’s milk reduces greenhouse gas emissions, land use and energy consumption.
Tastewise, which provides food and beverage data and intelligence, said in a December 2020 report that “plant-based everything” will be one of the top 10 U.S. trends for this year.
Oatly’s key markets are Sweden, Germany and the U.K., though its products were available in 60,000 retail stores and 32,200 coffee shops around the world as of December 31, 2020. Among the places where customers can find Oatly is Starbucks, where demand was so high there was a shortage soon after the coffee chain introduced beverages made with the item.
Oatly arrived in the U.S. in 2017. The company says it “focused on targeting coffee’s tastemakers, professional baristas at independent coffee shops” as a way to enter the market.”
By December 31, 2020, Oatly was in more than 7,500 retail shops and 10,000 coffee shops in the U.S. Revenue in 2020 totaled $100 million in the U.S.
Oatly can also be found in 11,000 coffee and tea shops in China, and at more than 6,000 retail and specialty shops across the country, including thousands of Starbucks locations.
Loss of Warning
In 2020, Oatly had revenue of $421.4 million, up from $204.0 million the year before. However, the company reported a loss of $60.4 million “reflecting our continued investment in production, brand awareness, new markets and product development,” the prospectus said.
Oatly is classified as an “emerging growth company,” which means it does not have to make the same disclosures required of bigger public companies. A business remains an emerging growth company until it reaches a number of milestones, including annual revenue of more than $1.07 billion.
Oatly warns that it has reported losses over the last “several” years and expects operating and capital expenses to rise “substantially.”
“Our expansion efforts may take longer or prove more expensive than we anticipate, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we may not succeed in increasing our revenue and margins sufficiently to offset the anticipated higher expenses,” the company said in its prospectus.
“We incur significant expenses in researching and developing our innovative products, building out our production and manufacturing facilities, obtaining and storing ingredients and other products and marketing the products we offer.”
The dairy market is highly competitive
Oatly acknowledged in its offering documents that it faces fierce competition, including from “multinational corporations with substantially greater resources and operations than us.”
That would include British consumer goods maker Unilever, which said last year that it aims to generate revenue of one billion euros, or $1.2 billion, by 2027 from plant-based substitutes for meat and dairy, for example Hellmann’s vegan mayonnaise or Ben & Jerry’s dairy-free ice cream. Unilever has not announced plans for a milk substitute.
Some industry analysts argue that Oatly’s size gives it an edge over these giants, allowing it to be more innovative than a corporate behemoth. Food start-ups are “younger and faster,” said Patrick Müller-Sarmiento, head of the consumer goods and retail practice at Roland Berger, a German consulting firm.
The established food giants also have a tougher time than newcomers convincing consumers that they are sincere about saving the planet, an important part of the oat milk sales pitch.
Mr. Müller-Sarmiento, the former chief executive of Real, a German chain of big box stores, said meat and dairy alternatives are not having trouble competing with Big Food for precious retail shelf space. “Retailers are urgently looking for new products,” he said.
Time was when Nestlé or Unilever would have simply acquired Oatly, just as they have gobbled up hundreds of other brands. But they would have trouble justifying the audacious $10 billion price that Oatly has set as the benchmark for its stock offering.
Nestlé’s answer was to develop its own milk substitute, Wunda, which the company unveiled this month and plans to sell initially in France, Portugal and the Netherlands. Made from a variety of yellow peas, Wunda is higher in protein than oat milk. Some nutritionists have said that oat milk and other dairy alternatives are a poor substitute for cow’s milk because they don’t have nearly as much protein.
Stefan Palzer, the chief technology officer at Nestlé, took issue with those who say a big company can’t move as fast as a bunch of Swedish foodies. A young team at Nestlé developed Wunda in nine months, including three months of market testing in Britain, Mr. Palzer said in an interview.
Nestlé was able to adapt existing production facilities to make Wunda, rather than building new factories like Oatly must do. The company already had plant scientists who could identify the best kind of pea and food safety experts who could navigate the regulatory approval process, Mr. Palzer said.
The Wunda developers “could have any expert they wanted to have on the project,” Mr. Palzer said. “That enabled them to move at this speed.”
Nestlé already has dairy-free versions of Nesquik drinks and Häagen-Dazs ice cream and sells coffee creamers made from a blend of oat and almond milk using the Starbucks brand. The company is in a major push to develop substitutes for almost any kind of animal product. The next frontier: fish. Nestlé has begun selling a tuna substitute called Vuna and is working on scallops.
“It’s a great opportunity to combine health with sustainability,” Mr. Palzer said of plant-based alternatives to milk and meat. “It’s also a great growth opportunity.”