Harman To Acquire B&W, Denon, Polk And Marantz From Masimo In $350 Million Deal

Is all china or India now.   Most of those brands dont make anything in their home countries and the few that do make only a few of their small quantity highest end products there.  The real thing of value in those brands is the car audio.  There is millions available when you outfit a 500,000 new cars and Harman is HEAVILY invested in car audio.  ATMOS is coming and these cars will have 15, 16, 17 channels with speakers everywhere, including overhead.  The small amount of stuff B+W sells to audio dealers is dwarfed by the automotive business.   Here in Las Vegas, a purely audio store cannot make it work, they have to do home theater and video to turn any kind of profit.

And doesnt Samsung own JBL?  Harman sold that off some years ago already. Looks to me like a pure car audio play on the part of Harman. 

Very large corporations owning small audio brands isnt a great plan.  I worked at one of the bradns mentioned during the early 90s and while it was wonderul staff and wonderful internal people, the management above seemed very motivated by stock values and getting the stock performance up.  The goal of such companies can shift in such a dynamic from great product to profitable product.  Theoretically great product should be profitable, but not always.  The challenge is product development cycles are long and the investment cycle is short,  which forces some manufacturers to pass on longer product development when it cannot contribute to a positive cash flow within the quarter.  I’ve seen this at work in smaller brands that get absorbed into larger ones.    

Brad