Is Texas Pacific Group a suitor for the discontinued Dover businesses?

Sources tell me that TPG, a large capital investment group, is a good match for the business units, which include Universal Instruments, Hover-Davis and Vitronics, among others. TPG has long held a stake in tech, with MEMC and ON Semiconductor among its holdings.

More recently, the firm bought Isola, the PCB laminate maker, which in turn acquired competitor Polyclad Technologies from Cookson. This is important because Isola’s chief executive, Ray Sharpe, is the former CEO of Cookson Electronics. It was under Sharpe that the company embarked on a strategy to offer just about the entire spectrum of electronics materials and process machines, from semiconductor materials to circuit board laminates to solders and SMT equipment. (Cookson later divested many of those companies.) Could Sharpe’s vision be realized under a different nameplate? Stay tuned.

All that said, I would think that KPS, which owns Speedline, will be a factor in this, in one form or another. That’s not coming from inside either company but rather just a gut feel of mine. Perhaps I just have Cookson on the brain: Speedline also used to be part of the conglomerate.