Innophos Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:IPHS) is a specialized company with a highly diversified product base: it makes phosphates that are used in a multitude of household and industrial products, from food and laundry detergent to fertilizer and pharmaceuticals.

And like the company’s vast product base, its investment story is a clever concoction of ingredients. Investors and analysts who follow Innophos have recently identified a number of distinct reasons to buy its shares, from its broad diversification that will help protect it from recessionary downturns in certain business segments, to its recent aggressive product price increases. Those price increases were adopted partly in response to price hikes in the raw materials that Innophos buys, but are now expected to produce a net gain for Innophos even after higher materials costs are factored in.

Shares of Innophos, which was founded in 2004 and went public in 2006, closed at a new 52-week high of $26.90 on Thursday. Bear Stearns analyst Scott Burk in May increased his price target on the rapidly rising stock by a full $5 to $32, saying that the company’s first quarter was very strong and its planned price increases “are passing through faster than we previously modeled.”

“Recent discussions with management affirmed … indications that price increases of 50% to 60% will be effective six to nine months before any appreciable cost increases,” Burk wrote. He said he expects this “mismatch” of prices to last through the first quarter of 2009.

As a backdrop to those generally strong fundamentals, there has been a growing expectation in recent months that Innophos’ largest shareholder, the private equity firm Bain Capital, would take advantage of the company’s strong stock price and begin reducing its stake, potentially spurring some near-term weakness. On Thursday, the company announced that Bain had indeed decided to sell a large chunk of its stock. In a prospectus filed the same day, Innophos said that Bain’s planned sale of . . .

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