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With any luck they can shed the Gibson Lifestyle companies and just go back to making guitars like they should have done in the first place.
Well, it certainly matters if you happen to work for Gibson.....Sad to see an iconic American brand struggling. Young people don't seem to listen much to guitar oriented music anymore. Everything is soulless, electronically generated crap that sounds like a washing machine with an unbalanced load. I know my parents thought the same thing about my music, but a lot of it (certainly not all) has stood the test of time. There are fewer people taking up the guitar (or pianio, or etc etc etc) because it requires effort to learn- if it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Everything the young people listen to today comes out of GarbageBand or its ilk.Hope Gibson survives.
So not true. Pull up youtube and look up the many boys and girls across the globe shredding their axes. Walk into a guitar center and there are always people checking out guitars. You make it sound like everyone played in the ‘old days’. Guitars are ever popular but always been a small market. And Gibsons are expensive. So you’re not really talking about these darned kids. You’re talking about midlife crisis men who suddenly no longer have the urge to plink down 1000 plus. Got nothing to do with the younger generation.
Maybe their troubles with the government in 2011 had something to do with this. https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2011/08/31/140090116/why-gibson-guitar-was-raided-by-the-justice-department
Henry Juszkiewicz, the chief executive officer of Gibson Guitar Corp., tells National Review Online that President Obama, a “big liberal,” has done “untold damage to business” and should not be applauded for his jobs speech. ”He’s a government fan,” he says. “He has a problem with successful businesses. He thinks they’re the problem, that they shouldn’t be quite as successful.”“He is using the levers of government to not only redistribute, but to penalize,” he adds. “I see a difference between what he said and what he’s doing.”Gibson has been under federal investigation in recent months, reportedly for its importation practices. Juskiewicz blames the Obama administration for causing his company, an iconic American brand, to lose money and lawyer up.“We’re under attack,” Juskiewicz says. “It’s pretty interesting to see that one of the points in Obama’s speech was to cut back regulation and promote jobs, when, in fact, he’s done just the opposite with us. We have been under investigation and harassment for over two years and that continues on — seized goods, shut down our plant.”
One of Gibson’s leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Company. The C.E.O., Chris Martin IV, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the DNC over the past couple of election cycles. According to C.F. Martin’s catalog, several of their guitars contain “East Indian Rosewood.” In case you were wondering, that is the exact same wood in at least ten of Gibson’s guitars.
After: spending nearly two and half million dollars in legal fees: and: paying a $300,000 fine, the government has settled with Gibson and has finally returned the confiscated tonewood.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/gibson-ceo-slams-big-liberal-obama-robert-costa/No American laws were broken. It was political.
Gibson Brands Inc. filed for bankruptcy with a turnaround plan that will give some of the company's lenders equity ownership
The change in control will give noteholders equity in a new company, replacing current stockholders such as Chief Executive Henry Juszkiewicz. According to court filings, current noteholders include Silver Point Capital, Melody Capital Partners LP, and funds affiliated with KKR Credit Advisors. The restructuring will also allow the instrument business to "unburden" itself of a consumer-electronics unit that Gibson blamed for its financial woes.
Its Gibson Innovations business, acquired in June 2014 from Koninklijke Philips NV, was the source of its financial woes, according to a court statement from Brian J. Fox, a managing director at Alvarez & Marsal who will serve as the company's chief restructuring officer. Acquired through a leveraged transaction, the business faced significant sales declines due in part to a loss of credit insurance overseas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-slow-secret-death-of-the-electric-guitar/?utm_term=.cbd5e5c1747f
“This is a very complicated mix of economy versus market, demand versus what products are they putting out, versus are their products as good as they used to be, versus what’s going on with the Internet, versus how are the big-box stores dealing with what’s going on,” Smith says. “But I’ll tell you this: You put a magic guitar in a case and ship it to a dealer, it will sell.”
Then there’s Henry Juszkiewicz, the biggest and most controversial of the music instrument moguls. When he and a partner bought Gibson in 1986, for just $5 million, the onetime giant was dying
There’s also the line of self-tuning “robot” guitars that Gibson spent more than a decade and millions of dollars developing. In 2015, Juszkiewicz made the feature standard on most new guitars. Sales dropped so dramatically, as players and collectors questioned the added cost and value, that Gibson told dealers to slash prices.
Journey’s Neal Schon says he battled with Juszkiewicz when he served as a consultant to Gibson.“I was trying to help Henry and shoo him away from areas that he was spending a whole lot of money in,” Schon says. “All this electronical, robot crap. I told him, point blank, ‘What you’re doing, Roland and other companies are light-years in front of you, you’ve got this whole building you’ve designated to be working on this synth guitar. I’ve played it. And it just doesn’t work.’ And he refused to believe that.”
Juszkiewicz says that one day, the self-tuning guitars will be recognized as a great innovation, comparing them with the advent of the television remote control. He also believes in the Philips purchase. Eventually, he says, the acquisition will be recognized as the right decision.(6/2017)
I don't trust the government to do the right thing. Just look at how the I.R.S. was used as a political tool.
As evidenced above, politics has nothing to do with Gibson's problems. Unless you're saying the government should invest in in ROBOT GUITARS. Dangerous technology. Think of the consequences, man!
It definitely was a piece of it. I wish it wasn't so it can solely be a management problem.
