Domino’s Pizza becomes reigning champion of IPOs

The success of Domino’s has been so great that Harvard Business Review wrote an article on its reinvention – and its praising contents will have investors take note of the pizza company’s sixth IPO.

Bill Taylor, the article’s author, suggested the scale of change at Domino’s was remarkable. “Patrick Doyle became CEO in 2010, when the company’s growth was slow and its stock price was stuck at $8.76 per share. Domino’s can now be found in 12,500 locations across 80 countries, at a share price of $160.

“To unleash such change in a short period of time, management first had to acknowledge Domino’s was as much a tech company as it was a pizza company. They also had to reinvigorate the brand. Even if delivery was essential, the pizza mattered too – and the pizza was bad.

“After Doyle took over, the company launched an ad campaign that has become legendary for its boldness, sharing comments from focus groups about what people thought of the product.”

This transparency, coupled with the ability to stop playing it safe, worked wonders for Domino’s. In fact, 2017 saw the pizza company outperform Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon. So you’ll be happy to know it’s looking for another slice of IPO pie (or is that pizza?).

Indeed, the pizza company already has listings in Mexico, India, Australia, the UK and the US, with the Financial Times detailing how the UK chain grew over 1,000 per cent in the past ten years. Over the same amount of time, the Australia-based chain saw a share price rise of 1,646 per cent.

And now, DP Eurasia, the franchisee in Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, is looking to follow the UK chain’s steps by getting listed on the London Stock Exchange around 3 July.

Private equity group Turkven and Aslan Saranga, CEO of Turkey’s Domino’s Pizza – the owners of DP Eurasia – are looking to sell their shares for the IPO, with the hopes of raising £20m. Most of the finance will be used to open new stores in Russia. But more plans could be on the horizon.

“There still remains a significant opportunity for further expansion in our markets”, Saranga said. “Domino’s high brand awareness and simple and scalable, asset-light business model is the perfect platform from which to grow our network further”.

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