Last Updated on 03/01/2021 by GS Staff
Tractor Supply Company (TSC) is a publicly-traded company. It is owned by multiple shareholders and not one individual or business. It trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol TSCO. Purchasers of shares of TSCO will own a certain percentage of the company based on the number of shares purchased.
Some of the top institutional holders of shares are Vanguard, BlackRock, StateStreet, and Select Equity Group. According to Yahoo! Finance, there are 1,121 institutions holdings shares with over 90 percent of the total shares outstanding held by institutions.
History of Going Public
Tractor Supply originally went public in 1959 and was listed on the over-the-counter (OTC) market. A decade later National Industries gained control of Tractor Supply by purchasing a majority stake in the company. However, members of the management team who controlled Tractor Supply orchestrated a leveraged buyout in 1982 which brought TSC private. Tractor Supply went public once again in 1994 and was listed on the NASDAQ under the current symbol TSCO.
Expansion After Going Public
The company opted to go public in 1994 primarily to raise funds for store expansion. They ended up opening 177 retail stores from fiscal 1994 to fiscal 2001. Many of these stores were opened in Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Florida. As of the end of December 2001, the company had 323 stores in 28 states with net sales of $849,799,000. Today, Tractor Supply has over 1,900 stores in 49 states with 2020 sales of $10.62 billion. Needless to say, it has been an impressive expansion since the company went public in 1994.
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Image Credit – Mike Mozart/flickr
2001 Tractor Supply Annual Report
Yahoo! Finance