Three American sporting goods retail chains - Eastern Mountain Sports, Bob's Stores and Sport Chalet - are coming under common ownership, raising their combined purchasing power with their network of 154 stores that generated total sales of about $800 million in 2013. The group is being formed following an agreement announced early this week for the acquisition of Sport Chalet by Vestis Retail Group, which owns the two other chains and is supported by a private equity firm, Versa Capital Management. Vestis is paying about $65 million for Sport Chalet, which has been trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. As we reported in SGI Europe at the time, Olivier Leclercq, a former president of Oxylane, parent company of Décathlon, made an unspecified personal investment in Sport Chalet in the spring of 2013. You can read more on the new transaction in the American edition of SGI, which covers the retail sector in the U.S. (it doesn't cover the retail sector in Europe).

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