E-Land in talks with MBK Partners to sell restaurants

E-Land is in talks with private equity firm MBK Partners to sell its restaurant chains as part of its financial restructuring plans, industry sources said Tuesday.

The potential deal includes E-Land’s 18 restaurant chains including casual dining buffet Ashley, sushi buffet Soosa and Nature Kitchen. 

The chains are run by E-Land Group’s leisure arm E-Land Park and are estimated to have brought in about 700 billion won ($610 million) in revenue last year.

According to reports, the deal is in its initial stages and is expected to undergo due diligence for about six weeks. Some estimate that it could be worth up to 1 trillion won, although an industry source said that it was likely to fall short of that amount.

E-Land confirmed the exploration of a deal, but declined to confirm details of the ongoing process, citing contract obligations. MBK Partners declined to comment on the deal.

MBK Partners is the largest shareholder of hypermarket chain Homeplus. Industry watchers say that the acquisition of E-Land’s restaurants may help strengthen Homeplus’ competitiveness as the hypermarket chain develops branches aimed at providing extensive entertainment and food and beverage services. Homeplus declined to comment.

If the deal goes through, it will help to pull E-Land out of its financial difficulties ahead of the initial public offering of its subsidiary E-Land Retail next year. The IPO, which was originally planned for the first half of 2017, was pushed back partly due to fallout from controversy over E-Land’s restaurants failing to provide full payment to its part-time employees.

In January this year, E-Land closed a deal with Chinese fashion company V-Grass to sell its youth clothing brand Teenie Weenie, bringing in about 750 billion won for the group. 

By Won Ho-jung (hjwon@heraldcorp.com)