National Beef Inc, a holding company that intends to buy a minority stake in the fourth largest U.S. beef company, said it will have an initial public offering of 17.25 million shares of common stock, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday.

The initial offering price is expected to be between $15 and $17 per share.

After the IPO, National Beef will be a publicly traded holding company and has applied to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NBP, the filing said.

Assuming a mid-point price of $16 per share, the IPO would raise about $276 million, with proceeds going toward buying up to 31 percent of National Beef Packing Co LLC. That company's majority owner now is U.S. Premium Beef LLC, a cattle producer-owned company.

National Beef Packing Co LLC has three beef processing plants and processes about 14 percent of the U.S. cattle. For the fiscal year ended August 2009, it earned about $142.9 million on sales of about $5.4 billion.

(Reporting by Bob Burgdorfer; Editing by David Gregorio)