He’s the Biggest New Player in Golf—and You’ve Never Heard of Him
The investor behind TaylorMade and Tiger Woods’s new Sun Day Red line is making an unlikely, $2 billion bet on the golf boom. Will it pay off?
He manages assets worth billions of dollars, controls one of the most recognizable sports brands and does business with some of the world’s best golfers: Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, even Tiger Woods.
But even Jinhyeok Jeong says people are surprised when they meet the chairman of TaylorMade Golf and find themselves shaking hands with a young Korean guy.
“When they look at my skills at golf,” he says, “they’re even more surprised.”
There might not be anybody in golf in a more surprising position of influence these days than this 39-year-old investor based in South Korea who picked up his first set of clubs a few years ago and now owns an iconic American equipment maker.
Jeong is the founder and chief executive of Centroid Investment Partners, a private-equity firm that came out of nowhere and paid $1.7 billion to buy TaylorMade in 2021, which was a bit like some unknown amateur showing up at Augusta National Golf Club this weekend and winning the Masters.
The deal made his Korean investment company that was completely unfamiliar to almost everyone in the golf world one of the sport’s biggest and unlikeliest players.
The whole thing is so improbable that even the people closest to Jeong struggle to wrap their minds around it. When he took a picture with George W. Bush at the 2022 Presidents Cup in North Carolina, he texted it to his parents only for them to be totally baffled. “My mom told me: Why did you send me a photo with a doll?” he said. It didn’t occur to them that their son might actually be hanging out with an American president. They thought he was posing with a mannequin.
Their heads might really explode if they saw a photo of Jeong with TaylorMade’s most important partner.
When Tiger Woods recently decided to launch his own apparel line, he teamed up with TaylorMade on a premium lifestyle brand called Sun Day Red, a nod to the color that he wears for the final round of tournaments. The first products drop on May 1, but Woods has already replaced the Nike swoosh with his new logo: a tiger with 15 stripes—one for each of his major championships.
TaylorMade has spent nearly a half-century making drivers, woods and irons. So why is a company known for clubs now betting on clothing?
One reason is that golf is booming. The war between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf means the best golfers are getting paid more than ever. The rest of us are spending more money than ever. Over the past five years, worldwide sales of golf equipment are up 40% and golf apparel is up 21%, according to Golf Datatech, a Circana-owned research firm.
But there’s another reason that Centroid is bullish on golf. Jeong says he’s on the hunt for global companies with potential in Asia, where Centroid’s presence is a competitive advantage, and that describes TaylorMade to a tee.
The sport is thriving in America, but nowhere is the future of golf more promising than Korea. Even though it has fewer courses than Florida, Korea is now the world’s largest market for golf apparel. Not the largest per capita. The largest, period.
So it was fitting that Jeong was in Seoul and wearing a TaylorMade golf polo when I spoke with him. To understand Centroid’s investment thesis, all you had to do was look at him.
He believes that capitalizing on the opportunities in both the Korean market and the apparel business will make TaylorMade worth more than what he paid.
Like most golfers, Jeong loves the sport. Like most golfers, the sport does not love him back. But unlike most golfers with an 18-handicap, he owns the company that makes his driver. He says his firm has plowed roughly $2 billion into the sport to buy an operator of private courses across the U.S. and a Korean country club in addition to TaylorMade, which it could take public.
This is not the first time private equity has taken an interest in golf. It’s not even the first time private equity has taken over TaylorMade.
In 2017, Adidas dumped TaylorMade when it decided to get out of the golf business, and the New York-based private-equity firm KPS Capital Partners took over the company.
One of the first things KPS discovered when it studied consumer behavior is that people really, really care about the clubs their favorite golfers play with. With that in mind, TaylorMade made a series of crucial moves. It slashed the number of endorsement deals from more than 400 to fewer than 100 and targeted the select players who drive equipment sales. Woods plays with TaylorMade clubs, as do Scottie Scheffler and Nelly Korda, the No. 1 men’s and women’s golfers. It also pumped resources into developing a ball good enough for Rory McIlroy. It even shifted marketing dollars to dominate your Instagram feed and YouTube algorithm, where you click on one golf video and hours later you’re shelling out for new irons.
The timing of these decisions couldn’t have been any better, as the pandemic was the best thing for golf since Tiger himself. The boom produced more golfers, young golfers and women golfers. And people who started playing as an excuse to get outside haven’t stopped. There are more rounds of golf played in the U.S. today than ever before, which is remarkable, because there are more ways to play golf, like “screen golf” and Topgolf. In fact, America now has more off-course golfers than on-course golfers.
All of which made for a masterful turnaround.
KPS went from buying TaylorMade for $425 million to selling the company less than five years later to Centroid for $1.7 billion.
Before the TaylorMade deal, Centroid specialized in small buyouts of Korean companies, including a textile manufacturer and book distributor. It was founded in 2015 by Jeong, who dreamed of building “the KKR of Korea.” But at the time, it was barely known in Korea.
The idea of an obscure, inexperienced firm going from domestic buyouts to a major global acquisition was so implausible that investment bankers didn’t take Centroid seriously when it took aim at TaylorMade, said Kangmin Shin, the firm’s U.S.-based managing director. He couldn’t blame them.
“If I were one of those investment bankers, I would do the same,” Shin said. “It’s very unusual that a Korean-based private-equity firm is trying to take over a global company.”
Others were skeptical even after Centroid pulled off the deal. Before his first visit to the company’s Southern California headquarters, Jeong was in a nearby Dick’s Sporting Goods shopping for TaylorMade apparel when an employee told him the company had just been acquired by a Korean private-equity fund. “That’s me!” Jeong exclaimed. Sure, the Dick’s salesman said. So what do you really do for a living?
But one person who recognized Centroid as an extremely serious bidder was David Abeles, the CEO of TaylorMade. Centroid had reached out to him and expressed an interest in buying the company long before the company was officially for sale.
When it finally hit the market, Jeong brought in local investors and raised the funds to make an audacious offer for TaylorMade, which he felt was undervalued compared with the publicly traded parent companies of rivals Callaway and Titleist.
TaylorMade was sitting pretty on the fairway when Centroid invested, which meant Abeles and the company’s management could focus on growing the business. There was still plenty of room to grow. Jeong says apparel sales generated 2% of the company’s revenue at the time of the acquisition, but he believes that number can get closer to 30%. And the key to making that happen is the market he knows best.
Korea drove nearly half of golf’s worldwide apparel sales in 2022, according to Golf Datatech. Fashion is a part of golf in Korea the same way frustration is a part of golf everywhere. They may be playing on indoor simulators, but Korean golfers are willing to pay premium prices to look like they’re on the first tee at Augusta National. “They really love to show off what they are wearing,” Jeong said.
He’s banking on Sun Day Red’s expensive polos and fancy hoodies being huge in Korea when they hit Asia in the next two years.
By then, Jeong might even do the one thing he hasn’t done as the owner of a company in business with Tiger Woods: meet Tiger Woods.
Maybe his parents will actually believe him.