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Cyclical Business: Skis Rossignol Back as Felt’s New Owner

The Skis Rossignol S.A. acquisition of Felt Racing LLC marks a return to Orange County for a firm with a difficult history here.

It also provides a peek into a lightly known local industry niche: high-end bicycles.

A price wasn’t disclosed; Rossignol’s private equity owner typically invests $35 million to $200 million in deals, reports said.

Rossignol, in Grenoble, France, has annual revenue of about $270 million, and Felt, in Irvine, has about $60 million.

The deal was relatively small but conjures memories of a bigger splash.

Huntington Beach-based surfwear brand Quiksilver Inc. in 2005 bought Rossignol Group, a prior iteration of Skis Rossignol, for about $480 million in cash and debt.

Within three years, it had sold Rossignol in two parts for about $184 million (see box).

Now a slimmed-down and growing Rossignol has bought back into OC with Felt Racing, its second high-end bike maker buy in a year.

Bill Duehring, Michael Müllmann, and Jim Felt founded the firm in 1999.

Duehring had been senior vice president of product development and engineering at, and held shares in GT Bicycles, then-publicly traded and based in Santa Ana. Müllmann owned a bicycle and parts distributor in Germany.

Felt had started welding frames in his garage for professional cyclists. He also worked in the alloy bicycle tubing division for Easton—best known for aluminum bats. His renown grew as a bicycle designer.

Duehring sold his stake in GT in 1998, and Müllmann “wanted to own a stake in a bicycle brand” at about the same time Jim Felt was able to put his name on a new one.

Felt Racing now sells about 100,000 bikes a year in 36 countries at prices from $600 to $26,000 across a dozen categories that include more consumer-focused products, such as cruisers and electric bicycles—the latter line launched in 2012.

Duehring said the sale to Skis Rossignol came together as Müllmann wanted to step back from the business and Felt Racing had begun to look for money for expansion.

“We needed a business partner to take Michael’s place,” he said, “and we wanted to grow the company.”

The partners sought “someone who understood our dealers and consumers, understood the seasonality of our business, and believed in innovation.”

Felt Racing had “talked back and forth” with the OC office of B. Riley Financial Inc. about how to structure and execute a deal when Müllmann heard from DC Advisory in London, a “mid-market corporate finance adviser” on mergers and acquisitions “with specific expertise in cross-border transactions,” its website says.

“The client turned out to be Rossignol,” Duehring said.

Rossignol’s desire to diversify dovetailed with Felt’s need to cash out a partner and grow.

Ski In

The deal is set to close at the end of the month.

All three partners held stakes in Felt Racing; Rossignol bought 100% of the company.

Müllmann will leave the company; Felt plans to stay on to work with teams and athletes and in design and research; Duehring will become global president of Rossignol’s Felt Bicycles.

“I expect to be here for a long time,” Duehring said.

He was a 2012 winner of a Business Journal Excellence in Entrepreneurship award.

The company employs 75 to 80 at locations in Irvine; an Ontario, Calif., warehouse; an office in Buffalo, N.Y.; and in Europe. It has 12,000 square feet at 12 Chrysler in Irvine and wants to bump that up to 18,000 in the new Irvine digs by June.

Next Stage

Duehring said Felt will stay in OC, which boasts a good talent pool and “easy access to Asia” where the company’s bicycles are built.

Besides, Duehring said, a bicycle company should be based where “you can test and ride new designs 12 months of the year.”

The “year-round” element drove the deal, Rossignol Chief Executive Bruno Cercley said in comments to the media.

Rossignol is a 110-year-old maker of skis and skiing equipment that last February bought Time Sport International, a high-end bike maker with about $12 million in revenue and operations near Rossignol’s base in southeast France.

It’s run by Altor Equity Partners in Stockholm. Sandbridge Capital LLC in New York owns a stake, as does the Boix-Vive family, which owned Rossignol for 50 years before selling it to Quiksilver.

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