With apologies, our normally diligent scrutiny of the powersports industry business community let us down last year - we missed the September 2015 announcement by Bowling Green Kentucky headquartered Holley Performance Products that it has acquired the El Paso, TX based MSD Group.
The MSD Group includes brands such as MSD, Mr. Gasket, ACCEL, Superchips, Edge, Racepak, Mallory, Hays, QuickTime and Lakewood; the acquisition brings the legendary automotive parts manufacturer back in to the mainstream of the motorcycle aftermarket, should it decide it wishes to pursue the bike product lines that have previously been sold under the ACCEL, MSD and Superchips brand names in particular.
"We are excited to bring together the great legacies of Holley Performance Products and MSD Group. The combination of these brands will provide our customers with the most complete offering of performance products in the industry," said Holley President & CEO, Tom Tomlinson. "We are aggressively developing innovative new products at Holley, and we will continue to build upon the fine job the MSD Group is already doing."
ACCEL was acquired by Z Capital Partners (James Zenni) early in 2015. Zenni already owned MSD and Superchips, and when announcing his ACCEL acquisition, he had referenced the businesses' "defendable market share and high cash-flow."
In our defence, expecting to see the ACCEL/MSD Group flipped so soon is not something that we had on our radar - indeed the zcap.net website still shows these automotive business units among its portfolio, so it has maybe taken them by surprise too!
This leaves Z Capital with only one remaining automotive property - the troubled Exide Technologies battery making business, which has been known to have been "on the block" for some time. It has just emerged from its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in 13 years, so maybe its reduced debt burden will be a 'pot sweetner'. Indeed MSD was the subject to such a filing in 2013.
Zenni's reputation is as an adroit investor in distressed debt/private equity; the company says its approach "includes making control investments in companies that may require growth capital, balance sheet and/or operational improvements."