Dallas, Texas 05/21/2014 (FINANCIALSTRENDS) – A worldwide provider of packaging solutions, Graphic Packaging Holding Company (NYSE:GPK) recently announced a secondary public offering of approximately 43.654 million shares by its selling stockholders. The total number of its outstanding common stock, however, would not change as a result of this offering. Moreover, the company won’t receive any proceeds or sell any shares as a part of this secondary offering. The company noted that Goldman, Sachs & Co. is the sole book runner for this offering.
Following the announcement, shares of the company fell 2.81% on Tuesday and closed at $10.39. The stock traded with significantly higher volumes of 26.14 million shares against its 30 day average trading volumes of 3.05 million shares.
TheStreet Rating:
The stock of Graphic Packaging Holding Company (NYSE:GPK) has been assigned a “buy” rating by the equities research analysts at TheStreet. The rating has been influenced by certain notable strengths in the company including growth in earnings per share, good cash flow from operations, and increase in net income, reasonable valuation levels and solid stock price performance.
As far its earnings are concerned, the company reported considerable increase in its 1Q14 earnings which was reported at $0.13 per diluted share as compared to earnings of $0.10 per diluted share in 1Q13. The company also reduced net debt by $24.9 million in 1Q14 which helped it record Net Leverage Ratio of 3.27 x at the quarter end. However, adjusted EBITDA for 1Q14 decreased to $157.6 million from $161.6 million in 1Q13 because of harsh weather conditions which impacted the results by at least $14.5 million.
Sales Performance:
Graphic Packaging Holding Company (NYSE:GPK) reported 2.5% or $27.8 million decrease in its 1Q14 net sales as compared to 1Q13. However, net sales increased 1.7% during 1Q14 on a year over year basis after adjusting for 1Q13 sales from divested businesses.
Paperboard Packaging contributed 87.8% of total 1Q14 net sales and increased 0.6% year over year whereas Flexible Packaging net sales decreased 20.4% year over year.
