ASV becomes Minnesota's latest public company

ASV Holdings Inc. did not raise as much money as expected Friday after it priced its initial public offering of stock at $7 per share.

The company sold 3.8 million shares and raised about $26.6 million.

The proposed offering range was $8 to $10 per share. The shares, trading on the Nasdaq market under the symbol ASV, closed Friday at $7.85.

Selling shareholders controlled 2 million of the shares, so net proceeds to ASV are expected to be around $10.7 million. The company plans to use proceeds from the offering to pay down debt.

ASV became the first Minnesota-based public company to complete an IPO since Tactile Systems Technology, aka Tactile Medical, raised $40 million from its IPO on July 28, 2016.

Nationally, IPO activity has picked up from a slow year in 2016. According to Renaissance Capital, a Connecticut-based institutional research company and manager of IPO-focused investment products, 56 companies have priced IPOs this year, up 154 percent from the same time last year.

Underwriters can sell 570,000 additional ASV shares to raise funds for the Grand Rapids, Minn.-based maker of construction equipment.

ASV was a public company from 1998 to 2008, when it was acquired by Connecticut-based Terex Corp. for $488 million, or $18 per share. At the time of the acquisition, ASV had annual revenue of $246 million.

Sales have eroded since then, first under Terex alone and then under a joint venture between Terex and Manitex International. Company filings said that ASV had annual revenue of $103.8 million in 2016, down 11.2 percent from the prior year. In 2016, the company lost $952,000 after reporting a $99,000 profit in 2015.

ASV sells its range of equipment in North America, Australia and New Zealand. Offering documents say the market for CTLs and SSLs in North America was about $1.8 billion. Andrew Rooke is ASV's chairman and chief executive. He is a former president and chief operating officer of Manitex and has been on the board of ASV since the joint venture in 2014.