Interesting fact. It reminds me of how K-Mart is apparently big in Australia despite having died a slow and pathetic death in the US. Or how Yahoo is still a thing in Japan.
Almost tells you that there is something wrong with the business incentives in the US; or perhaps sequences of activities like starting with a leveraged buyout, saddling the new company with debt, and subsequently gutting the company to make the huge interest payments, usually to the principals of the deal, are considered gross mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and breaches of fiduciary duty rather than good ways to "unlock value".
I think in the case of the two companies I mentioned, they were managed very differently in the other countries. K-Mart, for example, had fallen out of favor with shoppers well before it was bought by private equity.
IMO, saying something is was killed by private equity is almost always misattribution. Thriving companies rarely sell out to corporate vultures (the particular brand of PE that people tend to mean when they say "killed by private equity"). Instead, the company has something fundamentally wrong (sometimes it's the company's fault, sometimes the market has shifted, sometimes there are deeper issues in the economics), and it sells out to someone willing to make a buck driving the business into the ground.
Examples include: Family Dining (Red Lobster, Applebee's, etc) was a dying market segment. Millennials and younger tend to put less value on table service than their parents did, preferring food quality over table service when forced to choose. Fast-Casual took over the entire price segment, so the companies either pivoted (see Chili's takeout expansion), or sold out to PE to decompose.
Local Dentistry is getting bought out by PE because the economic conditions that traditionally granted junior dentists the capital to buy out their retiring seniors' practices have ceased. Now, in order to retire, dentists are forced to sell their practices to PE firms.
The main thing wrong with US capitalism is the fact that it is legal to buy a company with borrowed money and then put that debt on the company's books and force it to pay it.
