BW Gas & Convenience Holdings LLC—which owns the Fort Worth, Texas-based Yesway and Allsup's convenience-store chains—raised $190 million in new equity in the second half of 2022 to fund its new-store construction program. It plans to build 28 new stores in 2023, most of which will be funded through this new investment.
Most of the funds come from HPS Investment Partners, New York, a global investment firm with $95 billion of assets under management.
“We are tremendously excited to announce our new partnership with HPS,” said Tom Trkla, chairman and CEO of Yesway. “We are deeply appreciative of the collaborative and accommodating nature of our discussions with HPS that showed a keen understanding of our business and are impressed by the talent of their investment team.”
- BW Gas & Convenience Holdings, which owns Yesway and Allsup's, is No. 21 on CSP’s 2022 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
Yesway started an aggressive campaign to grow store count and financial performance in 2022, the company said, building 17 new stores and completing 21 raze-and-rebuild projects in the past year.
The growth brought the company’s store count to a total of 425 in nine states as of Novemberin Texas, New Mexico, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Nebraska.
Yesway was founded in 2015 by Brookwood Financial Partners, a real estate private equity firm that specializes in acquiring and managing value-add commercial real estate and real estate-related operating businesses. Brookwood has raised about $825 million in equity in total to effect Yesway’s growth strategy.
In 2019, Yesway filed for a $100 million initial public offering (IPO) of its stocks with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), however, in December Trkla told CSP Daily News it was pausing its efforts to go public.
Latham & Watkins advised Yesway on the transaction and Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher advised HPS.
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