Private Equity Firm HongShan Acquires Rock Icon Marshall For $1.15 Billion (cision.com) 41
Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.
Uh oh (Score:5, Interesting)
Chinese bought Bluebeam and increased the price over 10x.
Chinese bought VMware and that went well.
I'm sure they bought this one because they just like music
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China is just following in our footsteps. They're moving on to late stage capitalism with private equity firms buying up companies to make a quick profit before liquidating off the assets.
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"You're fucking kidding right? Everything in China is CCP-controlled"
You know you can always get the real 411 on communism's current role in china from xenophobes who have never been there, would never go there, and clearly know fuckall what communism is
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It seems to be, they are confusing that from propoganda of more like that "Everything is within CCP-Reach" since the demons of it are no different than saying "If you don't do what the CCP says if they get a hair up their ass about your company, they can, and will over-punish you, and if they want to make an example, your family and especially if you move out of their reach (i.e. another country without extradition treaties), ESPECIALY your family.
USA is no different, and neither is a lot of Republic/Democr
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Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Insightful)
I may have to get into repairing amplifiers like a guy I talked to recently.
This is going to increase the value of the old equipment
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I may have to get into repairing amplifiers like a guy I talked to recently.
This is going to increase the value of the old equipment
No doubt!
In 5 years, people be talkin' about "Pre-China" Marshalls!
Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Insightful)
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This ranks right up there with the sad news of Bose buying out McIntosh....
I have no mods to give.
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Eh, that's only one more step in the demise of McIntosh. Even before the Bose acquisition, it shared parentage with Denon, and most of its "innovation" involved things like planting the entire chassis of a Denon DVD player inside a custom case with steel plates added to make it heavy, putting a glass faceplate on it and charging $4000 for it.
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Mostly you'll be working on really old amplifiers. These days, since around the 70's, it's not a matter of buying replacement caps at Radio Shack, everything is on proprietary PCBs the manufacturer won't sell you unless you're one of their certified repairmen.
Fortunately, you can still build clones of old school tube amps from kits.
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Why replace the entire PCB? Chances are it's a typical failure like a blown output transistor or cracked solder joints from being tossed around. The only problem would be finding obsolete transistors that aren't fake shit from China.
Re:Uh oh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Uh oh (Score:2)
A lot of the failures are of the board, which isn't a modern fiberglass and epoxy item, it's that brown fiberboard and it's affected by moisture.
I didn't know either until I recently had a conversation about this
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My thoughts exactly, time to buy up some old Marshall products, store them for a couple decades, sell them for a premium as 'proper Marshall units before they were bought out by the chinese'.
I did the exact same when a Chinese car manufacturer bought out the British car manufacturer MG Rover. I bought a decent-ish example of one of their later (but still British made) cars and tidied it up. The plan was to store it away for decades and reap a tidy profit later on, but I discovered it's actually a ton of f
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Remember, when the CCP negotiators say they want "peaceful coexistence" in English, it gets translated back on the Chinese side as "we want to make other countries our subservient economic colonies without needing an actual war."
This is why the Chinese government brazenly steals IP from the rest of the world. [chrome-extension]
This is why the Chinese government engages in brazen currency manipulation and economic dumping to destroy competing industries in other countries
This is also why the US Military has placed Tencent
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The real problem is we have too much money at the top so instead of a new businesses and competition we get buyouts and mergers and acquisitions and price hikes from monopolies. But every time we start to push back against that the voters go ape shit over some moral panic and we go right back to handing o
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Chinese bought Bluebeam and increased the price over 10x.
As far as I can tell It was bought by Nemetschek? How did Chinese buy them?
Chinese bought VMware and that went well.
You mean Broadcom? How is that Chinese? Because the CEO was born in Malaysia or so?
I'm sure they bought this one because they just like music
Aside from wealthy people buying sports teams, very few billion+ purchases are done because someone 'likes' something. You typically get a deal like this when you can pay more for it than the owner thinks they can get from it, and you think you can use the brand more effectively than the owner. I think this is more like chinese companies buy companies
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It's not China, it's take-overs. They rarely, if ever improve the companies involved. I'm struggling to think of a buyout or merger that resulted in improvements.
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private equity firm (Score:4, Insightful)
All you need to know right there. Prepare for the IP and branding to be sold off and the company dissolved.
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The enshitification started before this buyout. Marshall started selling Bluetooth speakers at Best Buy. Guessing they started selling a bunch of branded junk to pump the books to dump in on some unsuspecting VC firm at its peak. We will probably see a line of Marshall clothing at Target or Walmart to round it all out.The Brits and apparently the swedes would sell their grandmothers soul if they could net some cold hard cash.
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Yea, as a guitarist I'd say all modern marshall amps are terrible. If you want tube/valve amps you are not buying marshall. If you want a modeling amp there are way way better options.
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Selling at Best Buy isn't the problem. You know that a company is Enshittified when they agree to put their brand on a shitty, Chinese-made crap knockoff product for sale through Wal-mart. [fastcompany.com]
We should dig Sam Walton up and hook him up to a generator. With how fast he must be spinning in his grave from how his kids turned his "Made in the USA" into a CCP Treason Company, he could probably power the entire state of Texas.
PE IS A RUGPULL (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure some comment are about Chinese PE ... but it's not about chYna people.
Private Equity firm acqsuisitions are a DISASTER because they buy, slash, cut, fuck. Depending on if you're the landlord, vendord, customer, or contractee is how you get fucked.
PE is a RUG PULL. But the republicans love it because they're behind "inveest in PE firms, get money out". They don't care that means kids don't get to eat.
Fuck PEs and fuck repulicans and fuck those who pretend "that's just how the system works". Rug pulls is how the system works but they're not right.
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Sure some comment are about Chinese PE ... but it's not about chYna people.
Private Equity firm acqsuisitions are a DISASTER because they buy, slash, cut, fuck. Depending on if you're the landlord, vendord, customer, or contractee is how you get fucked.
PE is a RUG PULL. But the republicans love it because they're behind "inveest in PE firms, get money out". They don't care that means kids don't get to eat.
Fuck PEs and fuck repulicans and fuck those who pretend "that's just how the system works". Rug pulls is how the system works but they're not right.
It's almost like you're suggesting that there are flaws in Capitalism...
Dammit! (Score:2)
I like Marshall amps. A PE firm buying them means pricing *WILL* skyrocket, it's only a matter of time. US distribution has been spotty enough the last few years the prices had been climbing anyway, including in the used market, but now? Shit. I was hoping to buy a Mesa IIc+ reissue with part of my bonus this year. Thinking I may have to switch that to Marshall gear just to be sure I have the bases covered before they shit-up the mainline UK built amps and launch the prices skyward at the same time.
My Marshall Studio-15 is from 1985 (Score:2)
Glad I got in early.
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Glad I got in early.
Got a DSL20CR with a Greenback. Want to grab a couple of their Studio heads, but now I feel I need to scramble to do that before the inevitable price hikes. Why does everything good have to turn to shit?
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Even the food you ate yesterday turned to shit.
Another one bites the dust (Score:2)
R.I.P. Marshall.
There is a lot more going on than just this one event.
Modelling amps and plugins are good enough for most players while also being cheaper, lighter and more versatile.
But, there are less players.
It's close to impossible to make a middle class living as a musician.
The guitar and guitar virtuosos are falling out of favor in pop music.
Learning to play the guitar is hard, and many young people choose other hobbies.
Music isn't a driving force in society and culture like it was in the 60s.
AI "musi
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I don't think we should bemoan the end of the middle-class professional musician. It's now easier than ever to write, produce, and perform music of your own. And it can sound great. The opening of this world to so ma