Thread: Remington Filing for Receivership in the States

Originally Posted by Flyblown

Not just that @cambo. Remington has failed for decades to update their main manufacturing plant. The Ilion, NY plant is on the site of the original factory from 1820 something, the last time it had a major upgrade was World War 1. I watched a documentary several years ago about Remington that I’ve been trying to find on YouTube but no luck, it was really interesting. The tooling and machinery was antiquated then. Then there’s the problem of their new plant down south for AR15 and pistols which they built in 2012-14, and was funded by debt that the company couldn’t afford in a market of declining sales post-Trump’s election. They completely failed to see that coming and had been assuming that arms and ammunition stockpiling would continue unabated under Clinton, plus of course the Bushmaster lawsuit post-Sandy Hook. They got their numbers horribly wrong on that plant.

Slowly but surely there has been a decline in quality in their traditional rifle products, especially at the bottom end in the budget models like the SPS, most of which to my mind are a pile of junk. If you want a decent quality lower priced Remington, then buy a Bergara. Then the high end models started to suffer from serious competition from other brands, and the unthinkable shift in consumer sentiment to actually buying something not made in America.

At the budget higher volume end of the market, Legacy Sports for example has been very smart with Howa, getting the message about the Hogue stock and diversifying their rifles really smartly to take advantage of the Tacticool craze, but also using third party suppliers for lightweight decent quality hunting rifle stocks. Their marketing has been spot-on and they have made some real inroads into Remington‘s traditional market.

But also there is the problem of low morale, which is a killer for companies in a challenging world, the minute the workforce gets the shits, you’re in trouble. Moving parts of their Ilion plant to other parts of the country went down like a cup of cold sick with their traditional employee base in New York State, and they’ve never managed to recover the quality that we consumers demand. The trigger lawsuit debacle really, really hurt the brand, and the massive growth of Internet forums hasn’t helped either because now everyone with an axe to grind gets to tell everyone else.

So yeah taking out a lot of debt to try and modernise their business, and getting the sales numbers wrong, pissing off the blue collar shop floor guys, it all contributes to having to file for bankruptcy.

Interestingly, there has been a significant uptick in weapons sales in the US this year, Sturm Ruger for example was in big trouble last year, but now their share price is sharply up. This is of course driven by the stark realisation that their president is a fuckwit and will quite possibly lose the election... then there’s Covid, and a typically Yankee response to a resurgence of the civil rights movement. I’m sure Remington will survive but at some point strong leadership will be required to get them out of New York state and into one of the redneck states where they can operate relatively free of the kind of political pressure they are getting now. But they need to modernise very quickly.

A notable gun Forum in the USA has a special section for Tikka rifles. It is probably the most used section after the Reloading section.I have read it for a number of years. No mention ever of Remington rifles.Then again Tikka is doing to Sako what it deserves.

Originally Posted by TeRei

A notable gun Forum in the USA has a special section for Tikka rifles. It is probably the most used section after the Reloading section.I have read it for a number of years. No mention ever of Remington rifles.Then again Tikka is doing to Sako what it deserves.

Tikka and Sako are branches of the same company and share manufacturing facilities, a bit like Chevrolet and GMC. It doesn't much matter which brand sells best as it all goes into the same pockets in the end! Remington is like a lot of companies that are top heavy in managerial and techno-geek staff, employ trained monkeys for production, and light in good common-sense tradesmen! They are the masters of their own demise. You only need to look at their range of failed models and quality control issues over the last 30 years. It is only the M700, 870, and 11/87 production that has carried them through and they have had a few problems with them as well!