(Reuters) - Burger King Holdings Inc, the No. 2 U.S. fast-food chain, agreed to sell itself to 3G Capital, a little-known investment firm, for about $3.26 billion.
Below are five facts about 3G Capital:
* New York-based 3G Capital is backed by Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann and two of his longtime business partners Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira.
* Lemann, 71, made his fortune through banking and investments in industries from beverages to retailing. He is known in Brazil for having merged the country’s largest breweries in the late 1990s and eventually selling them to Belgium’s Interbrew in 2004. The byproduct of that combination was InBev, the world’s largest beer maker.
* 3G was in the spotlight in 2008, when it waged a proxy battle alongside The Children’s Investment Fund against U.S. railroad CSX Corp. That led to Managing Partner Alexandre Behring joining the railroad’s board.
* Behring, a Brazilian, runs the investment fund out of New York and joined the fund in 2005. Before that, he spent 10 years at GP Investments, Latin America’s largest private-equity firm that was also founded by Lemann.
* 3G Capital’s large common stock investments as of June 30 include about $855.3 million in CSX, $56.3 million in Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc and $54.7 million in Norfolk Southern Corp.
Reporting by Guillermo Parra Bernal and Paritosh Bansal; Editing by Maureen Bavdek
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.