Transition and Sale
Wometco co-founder Mitchell Wolfson died in January 1983, survived by two children: son Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., and daughter Frances Wolfson Cary. (Mitchell Wolfson was widowed when wife Frances Meyer Wolfson died in 1980; eldest son Louis Wolfson, II died a year earlier.) The elder Wolfson left no succession plans in his will, and as a result Wometco quickly unraveled, making it a ripe takeover target. Investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts took over Wometco in 1984 in a deal worth $1 billion, the largest corporate buyout ever to that date. Assets included 45 movie theaters, three television stations, 47 cable TV systems, the Miami Seaquarium, the Citrus Tower, the vending machine division, and the soft drink division, one of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers in the nation In 1994 Cobb Theatres bought out the Wometco movie theatre chain. The Cobb chain would later merge into Regal Entertainment Group.
Wometco today still owns the Seaquarium and a franchise of Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin' Donuts stores in Miami, the Caribbean and Puerto Rico.
Read more about this topic: Wometco Enterprises
Famous quotes containing the words transition and/or sale:
“The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“People buy their necessities in shops and have to pay dearly for them because they have to assist in paying for what is also on sale there but only rarely finds purchasers: the luxury and amusement goods. So it is that luxury continually imposes a tax on the simple people who have to do without it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)