Article by Pat Schrawder
AN UPDATE ON THE MARINE ELECTRONICS “SHAKE OUT”
Earlier this year, I wrote about the financial “tough times” of two long time marine electronics manufacturers- Raymarine and Northstar. I said that both were having difficulties and that Raymarine was hoping for a buyout. The top contender seemed to have been Garmin but, literally down to the wire, FLIR Systems, Inc. acquired the outstanding shares of Raymarine Holdings Limited for $180 million including repayment of all of Raymarine’s indebtedness. They acquired the entire business operations of Raymarine and all of its subsidiaries.
According to officials at Flir, the operations of Raymarine will remain the same and they are hopeful that they can continue to work closely with Furuno, Simrad and Garmin with respect to Flir’s thermal imaging systems.
That’s all well and good and is exactly what would be expected from their formal statement, but it remains to be seen how it works out as a matter of practicality. If Raymarine could not generate enough sales to keep the company afloat, will Flir be able to produce more? If Raymarine’s heavy debt situation was a result of poor management, keeping the same staff would seem counterproductive.
Nevertheless, Flir is a successful company and hopefully, for existing Raymarine customers, Flir has a plan that will keep the brand viable.
Not as much is written about Northstar. Their company has taken a back seat in recent years but still has loyal customers. However, the fact is that they have less in the way of equipment offerings and little new product other than their broadband radar, which is the same as Simrad’s and Lowrance’s . The writing may be on the wall. If you search for Northstar products from popular vendors, they are showing “close-out” sales and/or very little stock of anything Northstar on the shelf.
Hard economic times have a way of “weeding out” small companies, but these two have been large participants in the marine electronics industry for many years. We’ll just have to keep a watchful eye on them and hope they survive the storm.
Not all of the big companies are in trouble. Furuno is still positioned well financially but their extremely popular GP1650/1850 series of color GPS chartplotter/sounder series has been discontinued and will be replaced by a newer, state of the art model. Unfortunately, the new units will not be available until the 2011 season. That leaves a hole in the marketplace for this season. It remains to be seen which product will fill the gap or whether folks just wait until next year to see what Furuno comes out with.
The bottom line on all of this is repair. As always, a unit that works well and does what you need it to do is still only a good purchase if you can get it serviced when it malfunctions. This would be my concern with any company that is having financial difficulties or going through a change of ownership.
Next week we’ll take a look at some of the products that are out this year in the small, stand alone GPS plotter/fish finder units and try to do some comparisons.
Pat and her husband, Larry are owners of L&L Marine Electronics in West Ocean City, MD.
