Experian Investors Reap Substantial Returns

Not bad for a few months’ work.

The investment group led by Boston financiers W. Mitt Romney and Thomas H. Lee that bought TRW’s information services unit less than two months ago and sold it Thursday made a profit of nearly $12 million a day on the deal.

Romney’s Bain Capital Inc. and Lee’s Thomas H. Lee Co. cleared a profit of $200 million each on the sale, after paying off their investment partners and bank loans related to the purchase.

The investment group paid $1.01 billion for Experian on Sept. 19 and sold it for $1.7 billion on Nov. 14.

The sale of the former TRW Inc. unit, now called Experian, to Britain’s Great Universal Stores Plc., “puts Lee and Bain into the upper ether of great short-term traders,” said Michael Holland, head of the New York investment firm Holland & Co.

Cleveland-based TRW shares in the profit to the tune of $54 million because it retained a 16% stake in the credit reporting unit, while a smaller investor group that includes scores of Experian managers, will net $101 million before taxes. The rest of the purchase price goes to repay a bank loan.

For Lee, the investment coup adds to a string of paydays that has made him one of America’s richest men. In 1994, he and his investors pocketed about $900 million after selling Snapple Beverage Corp. to Quaker Oats Co. They had bought the soft-drink company two years earlier for $29 million.