The once-proud Magnavox brand was born in northern California in 1917. The founders had literally invented the loudspeaker. The SPEAKER, no kidding. They went on to be prominent players in the two most popular electronic products of the 20th century, radios and televisions. So how did they come to this?
Magnavox made radios, televisions, phonographs, and stereos. Their products--and their brand--were highly regarded and widely respected, as is generally the consequence of a company founded by inventors and engineers who desired first to make good things, and, secondarily, to make money doing it. With brand new transistor technology emerging in the mid-1950s, Magnavox issued its first transistor radio, the AM-2, in 1956. But then... shortly after that...Magnavox management made the decisions that would eventually lead to the company's demise. All manner of spin was put on those decisions, then... and now, obscuring the real reasons for the company's failure and serving instead the agenda of whoever was telling the story. But their products do not lie. And their transistor radio line tells the story more honestly than anything else. Have a look at these. These are a couple of Magnavox transistor radios from the early 1960s, made just five years after their first transistor radio. What happened? If you're not a collector of these things, you might not see any big deal here. These radios don't look so bad... and they're smaller than that first one--and would fit in a pocket. That's progress! But beneath the surface of this apparent progress there was a transformation at Magnavox in these years that proved ultimately fatal... The once-proud firm was probably quite proud still of these early-'60s models. And that would be the problem. Proud--that in these few years they had shipped the American jobs that built their radios overseas to the far east so they could undercut their American competitors. Proud--that they could outsource the research and development budget too, by just letting the foreign suppliers absorb the costs and risks. Proud--that they had taken the low road and stripped away any interesting design from these products... that might have cost a penny or two per unit... Pride, always a short-term enterprise, collapsed for Magnavox when in the 1960s Hong Kong got into the radio market in the United States with even less expensive radios and Magnavox learned the hard way that cost cutting was not a strategy for success.
Meanwhile, business was good for The Nippon Electric Company, who made these radios for Magnavox. NEC, unlike Magnavox, was focused on the future. They'd take Magnavox's money, while it lasted, and build them a good product. It wasn't NEC's problem that Magnavox was more focused on next quarters' earnings than on providing customer value. It wasn't THAT hard to make a stylish product, but you don't make one pinching pennies. While Magnavox laid off workers and saved money here and there, NEC took a different path. And where... did those paths lead? Today, NEC's annual revenue--as of 2021, was 27 billion dollars, with 114,714 employees worldwide. And where is Magnavox? Where are their factories and employees? Nowhere. Within a dozen or so years of the appearance of these radios, Magnavox as we knew it was gone. Since 1974 Magnavox exists as nothing more than a brand name owned by the Dutch company Philips. Philips has so little use for it that they license out the Magnavox name to Funai Electric of Japan and they stick it on the front of TVs and accessories that you can find today at places like Walmart and Walgreen's. No, the classic American brand Magnavox doesn't belong to any actual American Magnavox company. Yeah, boys, you can take the flag down now.
What happened to Magnavox? Well, I've got 49 Magnavox transistor radios in my collection--and these are the best looking ones. Not great. That... was part of the problem at Magnavox. But other forces were at work too in American business at the time. Forces that, in the end, resulted in virtually ZERO American-made consumer electronics brands surviving past the early 1970s.
5 окт 2024