Quote:
Originally Posted by ZillaZ
A liability? It's not exactly a liability if it's profitable... unless you mean a PR liability.
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Asset or Liability doesn't depend entirely on past profits (even if we ignore that Hummer had their capital investments for engines, frames, and various components by the GM truck programs it's based on).
Asset implies that something is worth something on the open market. I was talking about the idea that the Russian company in this thread and the Indian company in the other thread decided not to bid (not a low bid, but a no-bid). The stated reason was that the Hummer brand carried enough baggage that they would prefer to launch a new brand from scratch (that costs a lot of money!!!). Think about it - a company wanting to make it in the US market decided they'd rather spend a few billion to launch their own brand, train their own dealers, come up with new designs, build their own factories, etc. than to buy the stuff that Hummer had. Sounds like a liability to me...
Given that Hummer is probably selling all tradenames and the factory, and maybe even some rights to use the current designs and tooling - these two companies must have independently come to the same conclusion - that there was enough negative baggage and dealer/customer obligations to offset the assets (either that, or both companies couldn't figure out how much to bid after hiring an army of investment bankers).