Danimer Scientific shares jump in SPAC debut
In This Article:
Stephen Croskrey, Danimer Scientific CEO joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company’s NYSE debut via SPAC and the future of the biotechnology company.
Video Transcript
MYLES UDLAND: All right, welcome back to "Yahoo Finance Live." Myles Udland here in New York. I'm looking at stocks that are higher on this Wednesday morning. We've talked a lot on this program and probably will into the new year about SPACs, and one company that is now trading on the public market after undergoing a SPAC IPO is Danimer Scientific. The new ticker is DNMR.
And the company's CEO Stephen Croskrey joins us now to talk about the business and sort of the process of going public here. Stephen, I'd love to just begin the conversation with the SPAC itself and choosing to come public through this route and, you know, kind of how it all played out and if you're pleased, I guess, with the end result for where the business stands today, where its capital position is, and how you hope that will fuel growth in the years ahead.
STEPHEN CROSKREY: Sure, Myles. First of all, I'll say we're very pleased. To give you the background is our company was funded over 15 years ago by small-business people and farmers in southwest rural Georgia, and those folks have stuck with the company all these years and helped us get this far. And as we grew, we were very conscious not to overdilute those shareholders. So we were financing the company in stages as we grew.
In 2018, we bought a used fermentation facility in Kentucky, and we started bringing the first third of that online. In March, we launched the holy grail of plastic two days before the COVID shutdown. So our plan had been to get some financing to start phase two of that project to bring on the final 2/3 of capacity shortly after that, but obviously COVID kind of upset the apple cart there, and it was a setback in terms of our financing plans at that time.
So we started looking around, and we needed, you know, to find a partner because we had over $200 million of take or pay off-take agreements. So we had customers like PepsiCo, Nestlé, Bacardi, you know, big brand owners like that that are forecasting great demand, you know, for our product, and we needed to get that capacity built. So we found the SPAC route was kind of the quickest way for us to get the capital on the balance sheet that we needed to execute our business plan.
BRIAN SOZZI: Stephen, I do want to ask you about Pepsi here. They own 6% of the company, 6% stake. You have worked with them for 11 years. How long before all of their soda bottles and bags within the Tostitos business, for example, the snacks business are made from your products? And is PepsiCo the only company of your kind they are working with?