This morning, it was announced that Usana founder and current chairman and CEO Myron Wentz offered to buy all outstanding stock of Usana Health Sciences (NASDAQ:USNA) at $26.00 per share. The closing price of the stock on May 12 was $20.83, so this represented almost a 25% premium.

The buyout would be made through Unity Acquisition Corp, an entity controlled by Gull Holdings. Gull Holdings is owned by Myron Wentz, and that entity (along with the “other participants” in the buyout) owns 68% of Usana currently.

Experts speculated that the company might be taken private in order to prevent future scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Indeed, the company says that going private will give them “significant cost savings.”

2 Comments

  1. TerminatedRamp 05/13/2008 at 4:26 pm - Reply

    Tracy,

    This stunt doesn’t prevent future scrutiny by the FTC, IRS, FDA, and FBI…

    Also, this whole company will be own by someone in a Tax Haven. This should now be a serious wakeup call to the IRS.

    And, I think it will be funny to hear USANA’s excuses to its distributors as to how this benefits them. Remember, all of USANA’s presentations use the fact they are a publicly traded company and that it makes them more legitimate. Now they can throw out all of their presentations and promotional material. And

    Distributors are going to have a fun time explaining this all to their prospects.

  2. Tracy Coenen 05/13/2008 at 6:13 pm - Reply

    It’s also important to remember that this isn’t a done deal yet. There’s a lot that has to happen. Including… someone has to finance all the debt for this deal.

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