HOBBICO UPDATE – Over the weekend, I was able to find a copy of the transcript for the bankruptcy auction of Hobbico’s Revell business. You can view it here:
http://upshotservices.s3.amazonaws.com/files/ff11e972-f6c7-458c-a00b-05e14958d7f7/f14c1828-a160-4bbc-8d90-2e6ba2f58964.pdfThe purchase price was $3.9 million, based on an inventory of $4.3 million. The closing date of the sale will be on or before May 8, 2018. The buyer(s) are the Quantum Group and Blitz 18-313 GmbH, from Germany. All other offers were rejected by the court. There are a lot of threads and comments on the internet about this sale, and it is easy to get caught up in the hype over what will happen.
So here is my take on it all.
No one knows what will happen. No one.
I looked up the Blitz people and the translation offered from German to English indicates that they are a management company, not a manufacturing company. It says that on their description at least. Any company buying up an outfit like Revell would do so if they felt they could make a profit with it. Perhaps they will find another buyer(s), perhaps they will learn to melt and inject plastic pellets into molds to make model parts, and perhaps they will melt all of it down and make buggy whips and butter churns out of it. No one knows. No one. Predicting what they will do is like naming the exact time and date of birth of the driver of the fifth red sedan with a license plate ending in the number “7” to stop in at the southbound Okahumpka Service Plaza on the Florida Turnpike after 10:22 am Eastern Time on April 19th of this year. Actually, your chances on that one are about one out of 527,040 – much better than figuring out exactly what Quantum and Blitz, etc., will do with Revell.
Everyone wringing their hands and losing sleep over the sale of Revell needs to take a deep breath and relax,
and maybe build something. Unless someone has the money to buy all of the inventory and tooling out of the new buyers’ hands, there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Some people also need to give up the internet posts and blogs and tweets, and stop telling folks, “Well I heard . . . .” It does no one any good to spread rumors that are not backed up with officially documented releases from the owner(s) of the company. Someday, Quantum and Blitz will make their intentions formally known through published notifications. In the meantime, there are plenty of Revell products still available, and probably will be for quite a while.
