Strategy in TECH...
Universal Remote Control, Inc. (URC) has had a round of layoffs heading into the holidays. Taking place last week, the remote control giant has made cuts to its team that represent approximately 6% of their total workforce.
If you saw my recent article on the Emerald Expositions’ leadership turmoil (See: More Leadership Turmoil Hits Emerald Expositions), in addition to covering the fact that their new CEO (just started in June) was leaving the company at the end of the year, I also provided some sobering key figures from their recent fiscal third quarter results report. I have done a deeper dive into their report, only to uncover even more troubling information.
Rumors abound for the last few days and now we learn it’s true, Frank Sterns, former Vice President of AV Specialty/Custom Integration for Sony, has left that position to join Sound United as Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations – Americas. This new role will begin on January 6, 2020.
Emerald Expositions Events, Inc. (Emerald) (NYSE:EEX), parent company to the CEDIA Expo show and industry trade magazines CE Pro & Commercial Integrator, announced this week that CEO Sally Shankland will be leaving the company by the end of this year. Shankland was appointed CEO just this past June 2019, and has said she will step down “for personal health reasons.” Once again, the organization is plunged into a leadership vacuum which began just one year ago with the sudden resignation of then-CEO David Loechner.
In a letter to the media early Tuesday evening, Richard Stoerger announced the likely impending closure of Audio Design Associates (ADA), a company that was a founding member of CEDIA and a significant driving force in the early days of the “CEDIA channel.” The letter itself never explicitly explains the reasons for the possible closure, only offering vague allusions to: difficulty to “defeat the noise generated on a public level”… and … that they “just ran out of time and money”… and … a failure to “reckon with” how “difficult and expensive” it is to tell one’s story.
As longtime readers may suspect, I am a bit of a newsy and as such, subscribe to an amazing array of sources of news and information. One such source is Fred Wilson, a cofounder of Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York City-based venture capital firm, who is a favorite of mine. Wilson does something that I admire and don’t seem to be able to equal – he posts to his blog EVERY day. Some of his posts are short, some long, some trivial, some surprisingly impactful.
Recently, Wilson (his blog: AVC, as in “A Venture Capitalist”) posted an item that really resonated with me – it’s about grinding…and I wanted to share this with Strata-gee.com readers. It is important…
Early last week, a holiday week, sources reached out to relay the news that multiple manufacturer sales representatives were being terminated by James Loudspeaker. Happy Thanksgiving…you’re fired. In chats, I heard of the pain that some those reps felt – for while getting terminated is never a happy circumstance, getting terminated during holidays seems particularly poignant.
This week, National Public Radio (NPR) tells the story of the Minneapolis Speaker Company, Inc., known as MISCO, a St. Paul, MN-based manufacturer of speaker drivers and systems sold mostly on an OEM basis, who is struggling to continue to manufacture products here in the U.S. as they have for the last 70 years. What threatens their ability to continue to do so? In a word…tariffs.
For a few weeks now, I’ve been chasing a rumor that both sides of the failed Sound United acquisition of Onkyo’s branded A/V business were in the throes of a major reorganization. The rumors, it seems, were true – starting with Onkyo’s announced reorganization last week…and now word that Sound United is also implementing changes to its management structure.
It appears that the other shoe is dropping in the wake of the failed acquisition of Onkyo Corporation’s branded A/V division by Sound United last month, as the company now says it will reduce its overhead by cutting jobs. This appears to be the first step in a major reorganization of the company, as it seeks to right-size the organization for the industry’s new, smaller, and more competitive environment in which electronics manufacturers find themselves.
