October 13, 2021
Subs -
WE ARE LIVE.
Qualified Canadian Readers Only.
I will keep this one short and sweet as today marks opening night for the Toronto Maple Leafs - which means most folks will be reading this Weekly at intermission before the third period. It also means Scotiabank Arena will be flooded with dataroom providers hosting their clients for a night out.
This week also marks kick-off for Q3 earnings prints - or whichever print our off-cycle Canadian companies are reporting. As my portfolio leans heavy into consumer discretionary heading into earnings, I am keeping a particularly close eye on consumer sentiment and earnings releases across the retail sector, especially as fear of inflation and supply chain backlog runs rampant.
Aritzia announced earnings after market close today, printing phenomenal results across the board. Revenue of $350M came in well ahead of guidance in the circa $290M area, with 75% YoY revenue growth driven by both in-store and online demand. The company refreshed guidance for FY22 to $1.3B.
Within the momentum-driven space, Else Nutrition announced a marketed public offering of units through a syndicate of underwriters led by Stifel/GMP and Canaccord Genuity. The company is a “leading” producer of plant-based baby foods - an interesting concept that continues to prove out the plant-based food sector - a space I believe to be the next cannabis/blockchain/psilocybin-like industry. Each unit will be sold at a price of $2.15 per unit, consisting of one common share and one common share purchase warrant exercisable at $2.70.
Lastly, General Assembly announced their new 42K s.f. master facility in Vaughan came online. The facility’s first day of operations produced 600 pizzas, and is expected to have a monthly output of 100K pizzas. That is a lot of pizza. This reminds me of the press releases I used to read, highlighting Canadian LPs’ monthly cannabis production capacity…yet there was no demand on the other side. An interesting data set which I plan to put out next week (stay tuned).
ECM World
Top 3 Notable Transactions
Dream Industrial REIT
$250M bought deal of trust units
TD lead w/ Scotia, CIBC, RBC, NBF
Canada Silver Cobalt Works Inc.
$3M best efforts of flow-through units
Research Capital w/ CG
Firm Capital Mortgage
$22M bought deal of commons
TD lead w/ NBF, CIBC, RBC, Scotia
Cheers,
G.G.