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I'm as old as dirt so I remember when companies and even some municipalities set aside money during the boom years so they'd have cash without borrowing during the lean years and the companies paid out decent dividends the whole while.

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.

I think you're right. It would seem to require extremely poor management to go into bankruptcy just one year into an industry slowdown. Even harder to fathom when you're coming off an 8 year long boom. Almost inconceivable when demand (and prices) for something you make - ie. ammunition - remains high.

Hopefully bankruptcy will mean swapping out the obviously incompetent management.