Las Vegas concrete company plans IPO

Jennifer Shubinski

Monday, Feb. 14, 2005 | 11:02 a.m.

Las Vegas-based Ready Mix Inc., a major player in the local concrete market, is seeking to raise $12 million through an initial public stock offering.

The company will use the proceeds from the offering for the purchase of plants and equipment in the Las Vegas and Phoenix area.

Ready Mix Inc., (RMI) a wholly owned subsidiary of Meadow Valley Corp, based in Phoenix, operates two ready-mix concrete plans in the Las Vegas area, one plant in Moapa, and two plants in the Phoenix area. RMI is not related to Nevada Ready Mix.

Ready Mix has 230 employees in the Las Vegas area, Bradley Larson, chief executive of Meadow Valley, said this morning.

Larson said that the company expects the offering to hit the market in the first half of this year.

"If everything goes smoothly, sometime in the second quarter," he said. "And since we're on a fiscal year that would be between April and June."

Meadow Valley will own 1.5 million shares of Ready Mix common stock, or 60 percent of the total shares after the offering.

Ready Mix plans to use a portion of the proceeds of the offering to build two ready-mix concrete plants in the Las Vegas metropolitan area and one plant in the Phoenix metropolitan area. The company will also acquire about 20 ready-mix trucks for each plant constructed. Ready Mix also will expand its marketing staff in order to compete for business in both metropolitan markets.

Larson said the initial public stock offering was the avenue the company decided on to fund its growth in both markets.

The company is looking to enter new geographic submarkets within the Las Vegas and Phoenix metropolitan areas. Those markets will likely be located at the outer edges of the two markets, but at a sufficient distance from these metropolitan markets so as to require the development of newer plants to service job sites in the areas, according to the company's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ready Mix already has expanded its operations in Southern Nevada. In November the company established a small portable concrete batch plant at its Moapa site to service the ready-mix concrete needs of Moapa, Overton and Logandale.

Ready Mix did not detail its market share in the Las Vegas Valley, but did report that at times, a small number of customers have generated a large percentage of its revenue in any given period, according to SEC filings.

In 2004, one customer provided about 15 percent of Ready Mix's revenue and its 10 largest customers provided about 50 percent of company revenue. That's compared with 2003, when no customer accounted for more than 10 percent of Ready Mix's revenue.

Larson said the company's largest job in the Las Vegas Valley in 2004 and 2005 has been the Henderson interchange highway project at Lake Mead and U.S. 95.