American investment firm buys Quick burger chain

American investment firm buys Quick burger chain
Photo from Quick.be

An American investment firm has purchased Quick, the fast food burger chain, just four years after Burger King France took it over.

Burger King France has sold the Quick brand to the American investment firm HIG Capital, they announced on Monday.

Groupe Bertrand, to which Burger King France belongs, negotiated the sale for €240 million according to reporting from L’Agefi, a French media outlet focusing on finance.

Groupe Bertrand is France's largest independent restaurant group with some 850 restaurants, and there were concerns when it first purchased Quick that those restaurants would slowly be replaced by Burger Kings.

But that didn’t exactly happen.

“The health restrictions have slowed down our project to convert Quick restaurants to the Burger King banner,” Jérôme Tafani of Groupe Bertrand told L'Agefi in January.

Quick serves around 36 million meals a year and was originally Belgian, founded in 1971 by Baron François Vaxelaire as the first hamburger chain in Europe.

The American firm HIG “expects to finalise this acquisition by the end of the year after obtaining the authorisation of the competition authorities,” said a press release.

“Our investment will allow us to support the Quick management team during the transition phase to an independent group and, above all, to accelerate the expansion of the restaurant network with the aim of doubling the number of restaurants in the next few years,” said Olivier Boyadjian, managing director of H.I.G. Capital, in the release.

HIG has some $USD 45 billion in assets under management and specialises in “equity and debt investments in mid-sized companies,” the statement said.

The Brussels Times


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