Louisville, KY-based BrightSpring Health Services, the parent company of long-term care pharmacy PharMerica, began trading on Nasdaq on Jan. 26 following the pricing of its initial public offering the previous day. The company uses the symbol BTSG.
In conjunction with the news, BrightSpring announced that it will award approximately $100 million in restricted stock unit grants to around 20,000 full-time, tenured employees.
“Our dedicated employees are the foundation of our mission-driven organization, and we are honored to have this opportunity to further invest in them in a unique way,” BrightSpring CEO Jon Rousseau said in a press release. “As we continue to advance, investing in our people has remained at the forefront in order to deliver high-quality and cost-effective care to patients. By creating broad and deep employee ownership on a large scale, we continue to demonstrate the company’s commitment to rewarding and further incentivizing our skilled and compassionate clinicians, pharmacists and caregivers and the broader BrightSpring team.”
Further details about the stock award program were not available.
BrightSpring announced its intention to go public last year, disclosing that it was seeking to raise $1 billion in the initial public offering. It had tried to launch an IPO in October 2021 but backed out due to unfavorable market conditions.
The company said it intends to use the net proceeds from its IPO to repay debts and to make required payments in connection with the termination of its monitoring agreement with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. and Walgreens Boots Alliance, with any remainder to be used for general corporate purposes.
PharMerica itself went private in 2017 when it was acquired for $1.4 billion by what then was a newly formed company controlled by global investment firm KKR, with Walgreens Boots Alliance as a minority investor. PharMerica merged with BrightSpring in 2019 as part of KKR’s acquisition of BrightSpring. With BrightSpring going public, affiliates of KKR and Walgreens Boots Alliance now hold the majority of the company’s shares.
PharMerica serves the areas of skilled nursing, assisted living, hospice, intellectual disability and developmental disabilities/behavioral health, home infusion, and specialty and hospital management.
“We have tremendous respect for BrightSpring and are thrilled to support the company and share in this momentous event,” Max Lin, Partner at KKR said as BrightSpring began trading on Nasdaq. The equity grant program, he said, is “to thank thousands of hard-working and devoted employees for their significant efforts and further energize the collective organization as a quality-focused and innovative leader in healthcare services.”
