Posted on 02/13/2018 2:39:52 AM PST by Fai Mao
Remington Outdoor announced plans to file for bankruptcy on Monday, succumbing to a “Trump slump” that whacked sales by 30 percent in its most recent quarter.
https://nypost.com/2018/02/12/gunmaker-remington-filing-for-bankruptcy/
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
MBAs and outfits like Bain Capital, many run by guys who started out with fat trust funds built by dividends, fixed that.
JMHo
Remington recently landed several large contracts from the military (including one $80 MILLION ‘NY SAFE Act’ bribe from the Obama administration) - and they *still* can’t keep the doors open.
The disaster that’s been the R51 launch, recall, second launch and second impending recall hasn’t helped - they’re now offering R51 owners R1 1911s as replacement pistols and not even pretending that they’re going to be able to fix the R51. If R51 buyers had wanted R1s they would have bought one, so understandably R51 owners are steamed.
Remington was and to some degree still is very much a Fudd-catering company. Worse, it was *old* Fudds they were catering to - to the point where they were very late to or completely ignored these markets:
Polymer service pistols
Polymer carry pistols
Actual carry pistols of any kind
Modern sporting rifles of all kinds
Modern defensive or combat shotguns
Modern low cost CNC bolt guns (some of which are a fraction of the 700’s cost but equal or exceed the 700’s performance)
They were so caught up with their precious high dollar (but slowly dropping quality) Fudd-focused bolt rifles that the market passed them by and their much belated attempts to catch up, much like Colt’s (though for different reasons), fell far, far short - and were too little too late - so they find themselves in their current position. Irrelevant, with a sometimes-crap product line that most of the active part of the market doesn’t want to buy and an existing customer base that’s retiring/dying/simply not buying anything any more.
Remington shot themselves in the foot with piss-poor management for years spending more on mergers and acquisitions than on basic manufacturing quality control. The pinnacle of which was the Remington R51 disaster.
And so another Upstate NY Employer goes into the toilet, and hundreds will be looking for jobs that aren’t there thanks to the Almighty Prince Andrew and his merry band of corruptiocrats and thieves.
The people running the company didn't care about the market for their product.
They were from the school of thought that figured they could make the Brand Name sufficient to carry whatever tired old product line they managed to get out the door.
Times certainly changed when DuPont cut them loose. The "new" Remington whored out their name for other companies to sell branded trinkets, sponsored a stock car and other "advertising ventures" to no avail, and released a cubic crapload of mediocre new designs while ending production of models that worked. The owners then committed the penultimate folly of acquiring Marlin and flushing that brand down the toilet in less than a year and rattling the handle thereafter... the R51 fiasco has been sort of an encore.
"I don't need to know anything about a product, because I know how to manage money (or people, or flow charts, or...)" works great until the money is gone and no shark will loan you any more. The only way Remington could have been sodomized any harder than it was would have been if Mitt Romney had been put in charge of it.
They took the king’s shilling to stay there and prove that NYSAFE wouldn’t kill their company. Well, to be fair, it probably didn’t - but being located up there, away from the bulk of people buying and using firearms today, in a place where the older Fudds are the majority of gun owners, they just didn’t understand the market any more.
“Prince Andrew” may have accelerated their fall, but taking the ObamaBribe turned off many of their non-Fudd customers and the rest mostly gave up after the R51 debacle. This would have happened *anyway*.
“They were from the school of thought that figured they could make the Brand Name sufficient to carry whatever tired old product line they managed to get out the door.“
Personally, I like their tired old product line. Being a port-spider, all of my shotguns and most of my rifles are of the left handed version. The problem is appears to me, Remington strayed away from its core competency. Whenever a company does that they invariably have problems, loose customer base, sales, profits, etc. even go out of business.
Well, be that as it may, Remington was a major customer of mine in the late 90’s during the Sterling Marlin days, I did a lot of their marketing materials and retail POS for NASCAR as well as the Custom Gun Shop. It was great business and beautiful work. Took it away from a DuPont descendant, but he kept at them and eventually got it back after a few years. They’re not now what they were even then. Never did appear to put any real roots down at their headquarters in NC.
As one of the largest manufacturers in the world of firearms and ammunition, we have some of the most globally recognized brands including Remington, Bushmaster Firearms, DPMS/Panther Arms, Marlin, H&R, The Parker Gun, Tapco, Advanced Armament Corp., Dakota Arms, Nesika, Stormlake, Timbersmith and Barnes Bullets.
Such short term horizons are destroying western cultures and democracies.
A lot of that is licensing deals, not outright purchases. Those made money, believe it or not. Their buying spree of other companies was mostly done of firearms makers and performed during the better years. They actually bought up more or less successful (at the time) smaller firms and *should* have been able to use them as a license to print money during the Obama years - Bushmaster, DPMS, Marlin... they own one of the most prolific accessory makers, Tapco. They basically had a license to print money during the Obama years - and they blew it all with mismanagement.
Look at their 10K filing from FY2016: http://www.guns.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Remington-10K-2016.pdf
Read through that and you’ll see that it wasn’t the acquisitions that tanked them. They lay it all out there in black and white - bad management decisions (many straight out of the MBA schools) tanked the company.
Remington cannot service the debt Cerberus Capital Management saddled them when. A few dud products should not kill a debt free company. I suppose I should buy up all the Barnes bullets I can find for my muzzleloader. I use the Barnes Original. Too bad for Marlin getting sucked down the drain with Remington.
Remington Outdoors is the renamed Freedom Group, which in addition to Remington Firearms, owns Bushmaster, DPMS, Marlin, Advanced Armament, Tapco, and more.
Remington Outdoors/Freedom Group is owned by Cerberus Capital, the same venture capital firm that bought Chrysler from Daimler and promptly ran it into the ground.
Mmmm... not so sure about that. The problem is that the market started moving away from *buying* their core competencies, so they bought in companies that were making what people wanted to buy. Where they screwed up was that they then ran them like another part of Remington, subject to the same crap that was ruining their main lines, and reduced this expertise they’d bought to some labels slapped on low quality weapons. They somehow managed to convert Bushmaster, which was a leading name in AR-15 pattern rifles at the time of purchase, into a laughingstock that nobody buys, to use one example.
They could have and should have left (again, to use the example) Bushmaster alone to continue in the marketplace. But they didn’t, they started micromanaging and needlessly consolidating their new purchase into what they already had.
To be strictly fair, Cerberus was lied to by Daimler-Benz; that case is *still* going through the courts. Cerberus was handed a raw deal by Benz - and FYI, Benz had *already* tanked Chrysler long before they sold it to Cerberus. Cerberus was left to try to fix Chrysler and might (again, I say might - it’s not certain at all) have done it if they hadn’t been Obama’d.
And yes, I do know who they are. See my above posts.
Their problems stem from being deaf, dumb, and blind — not because Americans voted for a pro-gun president.
Customers asked for more out of them and they failed to deliver. The market changed and they didn't. Technology changed and they were slow to adopt. They were poor managers of any positive gains they should have made during the best years any firearm and ammo manufacturer could ever ask for.
I hope filing will bring about the positive changes that company has needed for a long time.
Dud products, huge lawsuits, alienation of previously existing customer base due to a continued parade of dud products, *notoriously* poor customer service, support of policies that are in direct opposition to your industry and some very poor management decisions can kill a company fast.
I’m guessing you may not know just how bad they’ve gotten. Here’s a quote directly from a friend of mine when I mentioned this a couple days ago (rumors had gotten out and were posted here on FR).
“Remington has needed this for a long time, they haven’t been relevant for quite a while. I was recently reloading with some of their 5.56 projectiles and was having a bitch of a time getting my OAL right. I finally put the calipers on the bare projectiles, not only was there a ton of variation in the size of the projectile, but the crimp band on the copper was incredibly inconsistent. Just lining up the projectiles you could see the size and stamping variations from one to the next - and all came out of the same package.”
That is how bad they have gotten. Sure you want to try to load those in your ML?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.