Luxury chocolatier Hotel Chocolat is planning a flotation valuing the company at £150m to raise funds to step up expansion in the UK and online, and develop its manufacturing plant in Oxfordshire.
Founders Angus Thirlwell and Peter Harris, who each own half of the business, plan a £50m placing on the London Stock Exchange’s Aim by the end of June, which will raise £10m and hand them £20m each in cash.
Hotel Chocolat, which started in 1993, has more than 80 stores in the UK and three in Copenhagen, and also sells its luxury chocolates online. The brand has a cocoa plantation on St Lucia, which is home to a luxury hotel where a two-week stay costs up to £10,000.
The plantation is currently a separate company under the same ownership, but it will be acquired by the main group prior to the listing.
Hotel Chocolat has sales of £81.1m and makes an underlying pre-tax profit of £7.9m.
Previously, Hotel Chocolat has steered clear of raising money through the traditional channels. It issued “chocolate bonds” to customers and private retail investors when it needed to raise capital to expand in 2010. Interest was paid in chocolate, rather than cash.
A second issue of chocolate bonds followed and the company was able to raise about £7m in development capital from the two schemes.
Thirlwell, Hotel Chocolat’s chief executive, said: “Hotel Chocolat is built on our core values of authenticity, originality and ethical trading. We are very excited at the prospect of listing as it is the next logical step in our growth plans and will enable us to accelerate the many initiatives that we have in place, in particular additional investment in our British chocolate manufacturing, in new stores and in our digital offering.”
