SeaWorld Entertainment made a splash on Friday in its debut as a publicly traded company.
The stock of the theme park operator opened at $30.56 a share on the New York Stock Exchange, 13 percent above the initial public offering price.
The company, taken public by the Blackstone Group, priced each share at $27 Thursday evening, the top of its expected range, raising $702 million and valuing the company at $2.5 billion.
SeaWorld’s stock, under the ticker symbol SEAS, climbed higher during the morning, trading around $31.
The deal is one of the biggest offerings of a private-equity backed company in recent months. Blackstone, which paid $2.3 billion for SeaWorld in 2009, sold 16 million shares in the offering but retains control of the company.
SeaWorld earned $77.4 million last year, four times what it made in 2011. As a sweetener for its new investors, it plans to pay a dividend of 20 cents a share starting this quarter.
But the company, which operates 11 theme parks, including SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, is vulnerable to consumers who remain frugal in the wake of the recession.
SeaWorld gets most of its money from admissions at its parks, and also relies on sales of food and merchandise. Its average ticket price is higher than those of two main rivals, Six Flags and Cedar Fair, according to a research note from Ian Corydon, an analyst with B. Riley & Company.
The company is counting on the strength of its well-known brands, including Shamu, in a push to draw more visitors. It has added new attractions at its parks and released iPhone and Android apps. It also plans to introduce an animated penguin character, Puck, at its theme park in Orlando, Fla.
SeaWorld is still haunted by an incident at its theme park in Orlando, where a trainer was killed by an Orca whale in full view of visitors in 2010. The company continues to deal with the legal fallout from the killing, which is the subject of a documentary to be released this summer.
The offering was handled by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays and Wells Fargo Securities.
