• Questor Partners Fund L.P. agreed today to buy the consumer truck rental division of Ryder System Inc. for about $575 million in cash, allowing Ryder to focus on its other businesses.
• The division owns a fleet of 33,000 trucks that are rented nationwide through a network of about 5,000 dealers. The unit is the second largest truck rental business, after U-Haul, and controls about 30 percent of the consumer truck market.
• The consumer trucking unit’s pretax profit in 1995 was about $13 million on sales of $547 million. That was down from earnings of $27 million the year before. Ryder announced plans in July to sell the division, which was the first truck-leasing business in the United States when it started in 1933.
• Questor will contribute most of the equity in the transaction. Madison Dearborn Capital Partners, Societe Generale, Chase Capital PartnersChase Manhattan and Citicorp North America are also participants.

Source: New York Times