Rudin Negotiates $7M Investment by Riordan Lewis
By RAJIV VYAS
Riordan, Lewis & Haden has invested $7 million in Santa Barbara-based Intri-Plex Technologies Inc. in a complex deal worked out by Murray Rudin, head of Riordan Lewis’ Orange County office.
“We closed the new investment and now we are looking for new ones,” Rudin said.
The Intri-Plex deal was a recapitalization that took five months to close, Rudin said.
Intri-Plex,the name comes from combining the words intricate and complex,makes high-precision metal components used in disk drives and chips. The company has annual sales of about $30 million.
The company’s parts are found in Microsoft Corp.’s XBox, cable TV set-top boxes, computers and digital music players. The company has been consistently profitable, according to Rudin.
“We believe that over three to five years, the business can grow the top line and the bottom line substantially,” Rudin said. “After three to five years, the company would be at a size where it would sort of be an appealing acquisition for some of the larger American manufacturing companies.”
Rudin closed the deal after returning to the office from eye surgery in October. He worked from home for more than a month after the operation, he said.
The total size of the deal is around $20 million, including recapitalization of debt and equity. Riordan Lewis is the primary investor in the deal, while Wells Fargo & Co. funded the debt portion. Irvine-based Janes Capital Partners was the investment bank.
“It was an extraordinarily complicated transaction,” said Stephen Perry, managing director at Janes Capital. “The level of complexity was completely disproportionate to the size of the deal.”
Perry said that the deal had several tax and financing issues that made it complicated.
Rudin said that his firm has around a 40% stake in the company as a result of the deal. Part of the new money brought in by Riordan was used to pay off old debt and part of it went to support future growth.
