Holt's Cigar Holdings Inc., which rode the 1990s popularity of expensive handmade cigars to an initial public offering in 1997, is going private.

The Philadelphia company's publicly held shares will be bought by a company controlled by Holt's chief executive officer, Robert G. Levin, and members of the cigar-making Fuente family for $5.50 each, about half the amount that investors paid for the shares three years ago, the company said yesterday.

Holt's was one of several companies serving the premium-cigar market to go public in the mid-1990s when the segment was booming, making it easy to raise capital. Growth in the sale of premium cigars peaked at 68 percent in 1996. Since then, growth has slowed dramatically, and profits have declined as the segment has become saturated.

Wall Street quickly lost interest in the companies, and Holt's is the last of them to leave the stock market.

"I think going private is the right thing to do," said Mitchell B. Pinheiro, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott L.L.C., which was a co-underwriter in the company's initial public offering.

Holt's sold 1.75 million shares to the public at $11 each in November 1997, netting $17.1 million. By the following September, the stock traded for just over $3.

"The stock-price performance since [the] IPO reflects the lack of investor interest in the industry, which coincided with the end of the cigar boom," said Anthony A. Latini Jr., a director at Berwind Financial L.P., which reviewed the going-private transaction.