Sun Country Airlines Going From Private To Public

Sun Country Airlines, privately held for its entire 39-year history, is going public.

“We believe our flexible business model generates higher returns and margins while also providing greater resiliency to economic and industry downturns than a traditional scheduled service carrier,” the airline said in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) filing, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Sun Country plans to list its common stock on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “SNCY,” the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Share price has not been determined yet.

The move to go from private to public is generally seen as a good sign for the airline industry, coming in the midst of a pandemic.

“From the airline demand perspective, it’s only up from here,” Bob Mann, an aviation analyst, told the Star-Tribune.

Indeed, although it has been a torturously slow journey for airlines, there is optimism that the COVID-19 vaccinations combined with pent-up demand for travel is bringing the industry closer to 2019 numbers. At one point in April of 2020, demand for air travel was almost 90 percent down from what it was the previous year. Many flights took off with single-digit passengers.

The Sun Country decision to go public has been in the works for at least 18 months, the newspaper reported, quoting an airline spokesman who said at the time, “There are several options that our board of directors can take for the next step in our journey as an airline.”

Sun Country’s securities filing shows its investor pitch is focusing on the promise of a travel rebound as it markets itself as something of a ‘tweener’ airline – in between a legacy carrier like American, United and Delta, but not quite a budget airline like Frontier or Spirit.