Messing with Texas

It was the kind of detail that only someone who follows private equity branding issues would notice.
In a December 18 press release announcing the $11 billion acquisition of Biomet by a group of private equity firms, a certain participant in the deal was referred to only as TPG.
Industry veterans will recognize the firm as Texas Pacific Group and, in fact, the press still usually spells out the geographically fraught name before moving on to the acronym.
But for Texas Pacific, the acronym is becoming the name. The firm’s recently unveiled official website, www.tpg.com, uses the name TPG on its home page, and only unfurls Texas Pacific Group once in a section called “About TPG”. (By contrast, the more famously acronymed KKR has “Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.” prominently on its home page.)
According to a source close to the firm, TPG has been moving away from Texas Pacific as an official name for quite some time. Although the firm’s co-founder David Bonderman still lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and although the firm maintains a large back-office base in the city, the word “Texas” fails to fully articulate the global ambitions of TPG. Even the addition of “Pacific” to the moniker doesn’t cast a wide enough net, in the views of the firm’s senior partners.
TPG, with a new, $15 billion fund at its disposal, is active in Europe and Asia and has been scouting deals in emerging markets such as Russia and Turkey.
Many of the firm’s affiliates, such as hedge fund TPG Axon and venture firm TPG Growth, make no mention of the Lone Star State. Bonderman and company would like to see the parent company’s name come more into line with the branding of the proliferating family of investment strategies.
The firm has not yet decided whether to officially announce a name change or to simply let the official identity evolve.