Hobbico Announces Bankruptcy

[rockyboy]

Yeah, this isn't much of a "Fun" but it's certainly distracting.... and sad.

Hobbico - the company that owns Great Planes, Tower Hobbies, and a bunch of other brands, announced it's filed for bankruptcy protection. There are US based headquarters, warehouses, and factories likely to take a big staffing hit as this plays out through either restructuring or sell-off of company assets and brands.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2018-01-10/hobbico-files-bankruptcy-layoffs-next.html

Lots more info in the article, but the writing has been on the wall for this one for a while. I know my local hobby shop has been having problems getting ordered filled through them for several months, and brands that were distributed through Hobbico channels have been pulling out at an increasing rate due to non-payments and supply chain problems.

 

[sprzout]

Wow...I hate seeing this. Makes me wonder if soon, we're gonna be all flying homebuilt stuff through whatever we can cobble together out of raw materials!!!

 

[PsyBorg]

I kind of take announcements like this with a grain of salt. Specially when the term "Restructuring" is involved. Reason is that a lot of larger companies will use this for two reasons. Usually it is done for tax advantages and other business related reasons NOT pertaining with actually going bankrupt. It when worked with certain loop holes can actually be a profitable business move. Second its an easy way to be able to thin out worker population without going thru the human resources nightmare that comes with big company layoffs.

For instance Kodak up here in Rochester is great for doing this. Every year since I have been up here they "Restructure" by laying off tons of people right around Christmas stating losses. Then sometime in the first quarter of the new year they go on a hiring spree because business picked up and with the short term cuts stocks jump and at time they have shown record profits doing this. After this process they end up bringing a good portion of the people they layed off back thru temp services as "Contractors" often doubling their duties or more and cutting pay by over half.

Of course time will tell but



As I stated in the other thread about this Hobby shops can be competitive and keep up with online stores as people WILL pay a little more to save time and shipping costs but they would rather make 300% or more profit on single items instead of smaller profits and high amount of sales.

If they don't adapt they will fail but for now I am looking on this as a financial gains thing for the company with the new tax laws and such so the timing says they are taking advantage of this and will scale down but not go away.

 

[nhk750]

Hey , I didn't see this post and just made one...

 

[makattack]

Yeah, I hope they can come out of it in good shape. I still fly my Calypso and just recently got my Taranis X9D+ working with a multimodule to fly all the SLT based micros and stuff I had gotten from them over the years.