Who Owns TaylorMade Golf?

Gary Adams founded TaylorMade in 1979 in McHenry, Illinois, after borrowing $24,000 against his house to commercialize a new idea: a metal wood, replacing the persimmon clubheads that had defined drivers for a century. The innovation was real, but early adoption was slow until touring professionals began winning with the club in the early 1980s.

Adams sold the company to French ski and sporting goods maker Salomon S.A. in 1984. Salomon was itself acquired by Adidas in 1997, making TaylorMade part of the Adidas-Salomon group. Under Adidas, the brand scaled into a full-line equipment company spanning drivers, irons, putters, balls, and apparel, and it signed the generation-defining roster of tour players that anchored its marketing.

Adidas exited golf in 2017, selling TaylorMade to KPS Capital Partners for $425 million, a price that reflected how far golf equipment valuations had fallen. KPS ran a four-year operational turnaround: cost discipline, product focus on the Stealth and SIM driver lines, and a sharpened tour presence.

That work set up the 2021 exit, when Centroid Investment Partners paid roughly 2.1 trillion won for the company, nearly four times what KPS had paid. Under Centroid, TaylorMade pushed further into balls with the TP5 and TP5x lines and into lifestyle apparel, most visibly through the February 2024 launch of Sun Day Red, the standalone brand built with Tiger Woods after his long Nike deal ended.

The company has also stayed atop the driver category through successive product cycles, with the Qi-series replacing Stealth and the brand retaining its position as the most-played driver on the professional tours. A pending ownership transfer to the Entrada-Checketts consortium, if completed, would mark the fourth major owner in TaylorMade's 47-year history.