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Guest
Guest
It's not as bad as you might think. Souwester were £6m in debt and many of the delays experienced by your local chandler were because SW couldn't manage their stock control. Equally, SW were not exactly reknowned as prompt payers to the industry. Let's face it, there were little more than a wholesaler.
Now the manufacturers are all writing to the local chandlers offering them direct deals at the same terms as they received from SW. This is great news for the chandlers in general except that SW were very good at almost eliminating carriage charges.
So you may visit your chandler with an account at, say Barton, and the £5 block will take a week instead of 3 days, and if there are no other orders coming in from Barton you will be paying a fiver more for carriage.
It's a great opportunity for another corporation to fill hte void and I'm surprised Westmarine haven't jumped in - except for the fact that they were in deep trouble not too long ago.
In business terms it's nothing new: growth by acquisition is never a substitute for organic growth. Few companies can manage long without true increases in old fashioned new business.
What really gets under my skin is how the MD of Prout can default one day and re-emerge the next. Maybe it's within the law, but how many other small business did he hurt in his slick re-organisation? I bet plenty of his suppliers are other small businesses in the marine industry - will they make the press as they slowly sink into the abyss because of Prout?
Now the manufacturers are all writing to the local chandlers offering them direct deals at the same terms as they received from SW. This is great news for the chandlers in general except that SW were very good at almost eliminating carriage charges.
So you may visit your chandler with an account at, say Barton, and the £5 block will take a week instead of 3 days, and if there are no other orders coming in from Barton you will be paying a fiver more for carriage.
It's a great opportunity for another corporation to fill hte void and I'm surprised Westmarine haven't jumped in - except for the fact that they were in deep trouble not too long ago.
In business terms it's nothing new: growth by acquisition is never a substitute for organic growth. Few companies can manage long without true increases in old fashioned new business.
What really gets under my skin is how the MD of Prout can default one day and re-emerge the next. Maybe it's within the law, but how many other small business did he hurt in his slick re-organisation? I bet plenty of his suppliers are other small businesses in the marine industry - will they make the press as they slowly sink into the abyss because of Prout?