SAN FRANCISCO -- Gryphon Investors, a San Francisco-based private equity firm has sold MSD Ignition to management and ValueAct Capital.

Gryphon Investors acquired El Paso, Texas-based MSD Ignition in April, 2004. MSD is a branded consumer products company that manufactures and sells high-performance automotive ignition components to aftermarket suppliers.

The transaction yielded Gryphon a cash return of 2.5 times its investment and an IRR of approximately 175 percent.

In February of this year, Gryphon led MSD's acquisition of Superchips, Inc., a manufacturer of performance programmers and chips for late model production cars and trucks, serving both the gas and diesel markets.

"The fact that we have been able to realize a significant return for our investors in one year is another example of the benefits of our proactive investment strategies and integrated operations capability," said David Andrews, president and managing general partner of Gryphon. "We proactively targeted the performance automotive parts industry as attractive, saw the considerable potential in MSD, and put steps in place to improve MSD's manufacturing and distribution capabilities, which Superchips is now leveraging further. In short, we successfully executed our strategy and earned the opportunity to exit our investment quickly with strong returns."

The MSD management team will be led by new CEO Dan Gresham.

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