Private Equity buyouts this week: Apple Leisure Group (Newtown Square) ; Phlexglobal (Malvern)
Tom Paine
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What's the largest business in relatively bucolic Newtown Square? SAP North America? Sunoco Logistics? Well, the next largest?
Its probably Apple Leisure Group, which the trade pub TravelPulse says is the leading seller of all-inclusive vacation packages in all of North America.
ALG was just sold, by Bain Capital. The buyers were also private equity firms, KKR and KSL Capital Partners. Terms weren't disclosed.
Bain paid $343.5 million for Apple Leisure, according to Moody’s (cited by Buyout), and is selling after owning it for almost four years.
Apple Leisure produced a $250 million dividend (presumably to Bain) in 2015.
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| ALG CEO Alejandro Zozaya |
ALG CEO Alejandro Zozaya founded resort sales, marketing, and brand management company AMResorts, in 2001. It focused mainly on owned Caribbean and Mexican resorts. It combined with Apple Vacations, founded in 1969, to form a vertically integrated travel management group. After Bain bought in, ALG expanded by acquiring online platform CheapCaribbean.com, and B2B tour operator Travel Impressions from American Express.
In June, Reuters reported that Bain was listening to offers for ALG, because of interest expressed by potential Chinese buyers. The sought-for valuation was reported to be in the $1.5 billion range, including debt.
The opening to Cuba could give an additional boost to ALG's business.
Travel Weekly reported in September that Apple Leisure Group was investing more than $50 million to upgrade its technology, including web pages, booking engines, access to flights and software programs.
Although ALG has thousands employed at its resorts, LinkedIn only shows it having a little more than 100 employees in Newtown Square.
Vitruvian Partners buys majority stake in Phlexglobal
Vitruvian Partners, a European private equity firm, has purchased a majority interest in Phlexglobal, a UK and Malvern-based life sciences cloud-based systems and services company. Previous majority investor Bridgepoint Development Capital (“BDC”) will exit the company with the sale.
The benefits of integrated, cloud-based eTMFs has led to life sciences companies switching over from old on-premise software.
Last year, Vitruvian also purchased a majority stake in CRF Health, also US (Plymouth Meeting) & UK-based, which creates electronic Clinical Outcome Assessment (eCOA) solutions which also go into clinical trial data collection. There could be a fit between the two down the road, one might think.
