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The world's leading producer of brakes for wind turbines, Denmark's Svendborg Brakes, has been sold for the highest price yet fetched by a Danish wind company. British investment fund manager Doughty Hanson & Co paid the two founders, Erik Skjaerbaek and Jan Struwe, EUR 460 million, considerably more than the EUR 323 million it shelled out for blade manufacturer LM Glasfiber in 2001, a company it still owns after a failed stock market listing a year after the purchase. Also Bonus, now the wind turbine division of Siemens Power Generation, was sold for less. Outside the wind industry, Svendborg Brakes is a supplier to the mining, crane and offshore oil industries. In the wind industry, it supplies brakes to several of the largest turbine suppliers in Europe, the US and Asia, where it started production in China last year. Svendborg Brakes, in its most recent financial year, turned a profit of EUR 15.4 million on revenues of EUR 52 million. Company director Claus Sejersen believes the high purchase price is more a reflection of the firm's 50-60% share of the world market for wind turbine brakes than of the current shortage of wind turbine components.