High growth microcap with a niche productLifeway Foods is a microcap company whose main product is kefir with projected earnings growth of 25 - 30% per year for the coming years ahead. Never heard of kefir? Well neither have most people, but it's expanding into supermarket chains rapidly.
If your looking for a high growth company with a niche product, read on.
To give you a summary of kefir: it's like drinkable yogurt. Slightly tangy (effervescent), very creamy and tasty. Comes in 12 flavors. It's loaded with probiotics (much more than yogurt), is low fat and has less calories than yogurt. Kids even love it. They think it's a milk shake.
The CEO is a Russian immigrant, started the company 12 years ago. He runs a tight ship (12% net profit margins), and after 5 conversations with him in the past year I'm firmly convinced this will be a high growth company in the years to come. He has a mech.eng. degree from the Kiev Instit. of Tech. (like our MIT). He has designed the equipment (for the kefir making process) which outfits the new production facility which recently came on line. If your thinking about competition, Dannon has tried and failed. Alta Dena makes a thin, sugary tasting kefir, nothing like the quality of Lifeway's. The process is exacting and tough to duplicate.
If I may backup-- the original plant could only produce about $6M in revs. If you look at revs for 1997 you'll see this. Demand for the product was there, but no production capacity which led to the expansion to the new facility (highly automated with +1500% cap).
A collaboration was formed with Galagen (GGEN) a biotech company which produces antibodies. They are added to the kefir. Together they produce a dietary supplement (functional food) to enhance gastrointestinal health. The marketing and expansion of "Basics Plus" is now in progress with heavy advertising expected in 3Q/4Q98. Lifeway is lined up with several more distributors in August to begin shippments to hospitals, nursing homes and maybe childcare centers.
Insiders own 68%, the float is only 1.2M.
I could talk for pages and pages on this company, but check out MarketGuide for data:
https://www.marketguide.com/MGI/DownloadReport.html?stockID=2749&productCatID=15&NETSCAPE_LIVEWIRE.URLKey=undefined&NETSCAPE_LIVEWIRE.userchar=undefined&NETSCAPE_LIVEWIRE.productCatID=15
For in depth reading material there's about 450 messages at Yahoo:
https://messages.yahoo.com/?action=q&board=LWAY
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