Paul Spinnler
Well-known member
Again "baloney". And sugarcoating XXL for Shenzen.Right. That was the great idea of the previous owner based in Germany, Ventizz Capital. Their acquisition was based on what they thought was a great plan to dress up Sony cameras which they estimated would triple Hasselblad's revenue and they would then cash out in a few years and sell the company at a big profit.
They didn't triple the revenue, they crippled the company financially in the space of a few years. Fortunately DJI intervened with capital to fund a new direction for the company with a successful mirrorless system as demand for DSLR cameras was dying.
Being owned by a private equity firm with no experience in the photo industry doesn't automatically mean disaster will follow, but the track record for that scenario has plenty of big losses and mistakes attached to it.
The way, without knowledge of the details or the reality of PE, you paint in rosy colors DJI's ownership as a contrast to everything before is exaggerated.
Private equity never decides the strategy alone. It is with the management team that a strategy is defined and implemented. They might replace managers, but usually, it is symbiotic at the beginning as it would be foolish to not sit down and discuss value levers with the people already in the company (usually via many interviews before defining a mid-term and long-term strategy). If anything, the managers made mistakes and that specific PE wasn't able to turn things around with the amount of capital available for that investment.
To paint prior owners as bad and DJI as the white knight in shining armor is one-sided. Markets can change very fast, CEOs can work off of wrong assumptions, and then it is too easy to attribute everything to the "PE ownership" as such. It shows a complete lack of understanding of how investing works and is again some armchair wannabe authority babble. DJI is a strategic investor that is extracting maximum value out of the brand and often employees prefer private equity ownership as a strategic investor will incorporate the existing, extract the valuable stuff and fire unnecessary staff due to duplication.
The "luxury brand principle", ie being a broker for parts, adding design and a logo on it, and selling it at a higher price segment is a proven business strategy and Leica (with the SL line which is based on Panasonic tech) and even an Alpa, which basically provides a good metallic frame for Rodenstock glass and digibacks, is quite successful – it is the execution that counts.
In the case of Hasselblad for example - for my taste - the design was just plain bad and the execution was sloppy. They could have done way more to justify the up-sell than to commission an extravagant Italian design firm. Leica also learned from their re-badged smaller cameras that you need to put in a bit more work on the design and feature side if you piggyback off of an existing design. The SL is quite successful because it is sufficiently differentiated that people still buy it.
And with regards to DJI - they shut down H, Flextight, extracted IP (e.g. colour science) for their drones, exited the professional market to sell a prosumer digicam with off-the-shelf Sony sensors, cut service centers, Hasselblad Masters is it coming back? ... in my view a bit of their identity as one of the stalwart companies manufacturing highest-end professional photography cameras has been lost and it remains to be seen whether DJI makes further cuts and optimizations and whether the future is that rosy in this cutthroat market / difficult environment.
It marks a big shift that they killed off the H. And with regards to the 50 megapixel back – believe it or not, but it is NOT selling like hot pancakes. Maybe Steve can chime in whether he really is inundated by demand on this one.
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