China's Sailing, Sanpower buy bankrupt US retailer
Sailing Capital and Chinese retail conglomerate Sanpower Group have bought Brookstone, a US luxury-gadget retailer, for more than $173 million at a bankruptcy auction.
Cathy Hershcopf, a lawyer at Cooley, who represents the unsecured creditors, said the Chinese consortium bid under the name Sailing Innovation. It beat out a unit of US-based Spencer Spirit Holdings, which had offered $146.3 million for the company ahead of the bankruptcy filing, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Brookstone started as a catalog company in 1965 but now sells a wide assortment of consumer products, including alarm clocks, massage chairs and iPhone accessories.
Sailing was formed in 2012 after launching a RMB50 billion fund. It is the largest international renminbi-denominated vehicle ever created and aims to aid overseas acquisitions by Chinese companies. The vehicle is part of government efforts to promote the use of renminbi for pricing, transaction and settlement in cross-border investments.
Last month, Sailing teamed up with US-listed Yingli Green Energy Holding to form a solar energy-focused fund with an initial size of RMB1 billion.
Department store operator Sanpower Group, which is controlled by billionaire Yafei Yuan, reportedly sought to buy UK's department store chain House of Fraser in a deal that valued the company at $745 million.
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