Posts: 1906
Location: Oconto Falls, WI | I am not so sure it is a bad idea by Johnson. Typically having too small of a portfolio will hurt a company, but what Johnson will lose in terms of chip sales to owners of other GPS makes, they will gain in sales of their other product offerings that could be tied in-line with the newly purchased company. So in the whole picture Johnson has made their product offerings as a whole more broad to include chips. I am willing to bet they will make more money selling products that will be tied into the chips than they will lose by not selling Garmin or Lowrance chips. Side from that Lakemaster has some pretty cool things that are outside of the chips.
Think about it. How nice would it be to go to one make for everything in your boat. One stop shopping…That is what a lot of people look for now days. As long as all their products are good they have nothing to worry about. If they start incorporating all their products into a network…tell me who else can offer that?
It wasn’t too long ago that in my opinion Bird locators were crap. That all changed about the time they bought out Bottomline. Now they have a very good product. So the comment about how many Lowrance units sold to Bird units wasn’t a very good comparison if what is being talked about is several years ago. I am willing to bet Bird sales the last few years have grown quite a bit, and there probably isn’t as large of a differential between numbers of Lowrance units sold vs Birds units sold. I don’t think Bird will lose any customers because of this change. More than likely will gain customers. Lowrance and other mfg’rs have but nothing to lose. Lakemaster will lose customers as a whole, but as in the whole picture for Johnson the cooperation will gain. It’s not about how much money the individual unit op will make or lose, but how much the entire family of companies will make.
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