Posted By stanman on 03/06/2009 1:05 PM
I must have missed an episode in this saga. The last I heard the company was without funds. So, who is building these things - and how?
Stan -
Looks as if there is a lot of misinformation floating around in the US.
Marklin consists of a number of individual but related companies.
Their main location is in Göppingen, Germany, a secondary location in Nürnberg, and then a manufacturing plant in Györ, Hungary and a third-party manufacture in China.
There are also a few holding companies - some with the Marklin name attached and some not, like Adler Toys.
Don't ask me why the structure is set up this way, it's somehow related to the way the company is financially structured and where the investments come from.
Now, the parts of the company that have asked for and have been granted insolvency protection (ie creditors can't currently collect on their debts and shut down the company) are the Göppingen and Nürnberg locations.
Those locations manufacture relatively little, people at those locations are mostly support staff - the manufacturing locations are Hungary and China and neither one of those is affected.
What has happened is that the courts have appointed an insolvency administrator, M. Pluta, who has now taken over and runs the show at Marklin temporarily until May when he will consider offers from investors to buy the company.
A number of Senior Marklin executives have been fired, external consultant who apparently collected close to 40M Euros during the three years Marklin was under Kingsbridge, have been shown the door and the latest is that Pluta wants to close down the Nürnberg operation which currently employs about 60 people. Makes sense to me since under Kingsbridge something like 300 people were dismissed at Göppingen so they should have the facilities to absorb whatever Nürnberg staff they need.
Under German law, if a company is granted insolvency protection, the employees are guaranteed three months of salary, so the staff at Göppingen and Nürnberg is currently getting paid.
Pluta who currently runs the company has stated a number of times that it's business as usual at Marklin and dealers in Europe have placed substantial orders after the insolvency date of the 4th of February. A commercial layout in Hamburg placed a 100 000 Euro order and a dealer in Switzerland an order for over 500 000 Euros. According to Pluta, orders are coming in better than expected - he also has, he says, roughly 60 investor groups who are interested in buying Marklin.
So once this is all said and done - it looks like Kingsbridge and Goldman Sachs are the big loosers here - they invested 61M Euros and it's doubtful they see ny of that money again.
Delaying some products and cancelling others actually makes a lot of sense from a business point of view. Marklin announced over 500 new items at the Nurnberg Fair, that seems more than the market can absorb and Pluta with his team and input from Marklin/LGB went through the list and chopped whatever they felt were not viable products in the short term.
This should bring you up to date.
