Michael Dell's MSD Partners to Buy Ring Container Technologies

(Bloomberg) -- MSD Partners LP, an investment business backed by Michael Dell, struck a deal to buy Ring Container Technologies Inc., its seventh investment since the beginning of last year.

The investment adviser agreed to buy a majority stake in the Oakland, Tennessee-based maker of plastic containers and bottles from Carl Ring, whose father founded the company in 1968, according to a statement Thursday.

MSD is one of a host of groups that wealthy entrepreneurs and their heirs have formed to bankroll leveraged buyouts and make other investments. Others that have targeted acquisitions include the family offices of Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, billionaire brothers J.B. and Tony Pritzker, San Francisco’s Bechtel family and Best Buy Co. founder Richard Schulze.

Ring is MSD’s second buyout since June, when it joined with private equity firm CCMP Capital Advisors and Alberta Investment Management Corp. to agree to acquire swimming-pool equipment supplier Hayward Industries Inc.

Like Ring, Hayward was family owned, and senior managers of each company kept stakes. Since January 2016, Dell’s group has committed $1.4 billion to seven deals, including a combined $650 million in Hayward and Ring, said Doug Londal, head of MSD Partners’s New York-based private capital group.

Londal, whom MSD hired from private equity firm New Mountain Capital in 2015, said both deals typify the kind of buyouts MSD recruited him to lead.

Founders, Families

“We reset our approach to seek out founders and families who want to partner with a long-term investor that would maintain the culture of the business,” rather than bringing in a buyout firm that would aim to sell it within five years, Londal said.

“We thought our long-term capital base, the partnership with Michael and our structural flexibility would give us an advantage,” he said.

In addition to making acquisitions, Londal and his nine-member team take preferred equity stakes. The biggest to date was a $350 million investment to help fund the $4 billion purchase of Ultimate Fighting Championship by KKR & Co., Silver Lake and WME-IMG in 2016.

Dell, who four years ago led a $25 billion buyout of the computer maker he founded, formed family office MSD Capital in 1998. He started MSD Partners, which invests money from others alongside his own, in 2009. Dell has a net worth of $21 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The two MSD operations have about $15 billion in assets, including those owned jointly with others, Londal said.

To contact the reporter on this story: David Carey in New York at dcarey13@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Fournier at efournier5@bloomberg.net, Michael Hytha