Audiovox has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Thomson’s RCA-brand A/V business outside Europe and the worldwide rights to the RCA brand on A/V products, excluding TVs and home phones.
The agreement follows Audiovox’s January acquisition of Thomson’s RCA-brand accessories business outside Europe for about $59 million.
With the latest announcement, Thomson will remain only in the home phone business in the U.S.consumer electronics market, where it markets GE-brand consumer phones and RCA-brand SoHo and small-business phones. A few years ago, Thomson sold the rights to the RCA brand on TVs to China’s TCL, although it retained a minority stake in RCA-TV marketer TTE (formerly known as TCL-Thomson Electronics).
Audiovox, which expects the transaction to close by Dec. 31, will pay $19.7 million plus an undisclosed payment to buy RCA’s A/V inventory. Audiovox will also pay a fee to Thomson for five years based on the RCA brand’s sales performance, a spokesman said.
There was a time, long ago, when brands like RCA and Zenith were the top of the heap. Back when I was still in the retail trenches in the 1990's, senior citizens shopping for a new TV would ask if we carried Zenith, and regale us with tales of how their old set survived 33 years, two floods, and marched to school seven miles, in knee deep snow, uphill both ways.
Now, the brand is being sold, once again, for comparative peanuts. Can any of you alert readers think of any brands today that once were really the top of the heap, and still think they are, but have been coasting on their image for a decade or longer? What do you think will eventually happen to them in fifty years' time?
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