Sometimes during a preplanned acquisition like this, there exists good opportunities for many floundering gun companies to be purchased strictly for their tangible assets. Machinery, tools, fixtures, stock making equipment, perishable tooling, and the like. In short these companies are worth more dead than alive.
Take a company like Ithaca Gun, or High Standard. They've had many owners who have tried countless times to make them successful by restructuring, modifying product line, and the like. Most all of the time it has proven to be unsuccessful. Finally, they are simply given up on and sit in a state of limbo with plywood on the doors. They only exist on a banks computer as a bad, unsellable asset. A company like Cerberus can catch a lot of these down, but not quite out firearms companies and purchase all of their assets for literally pennies on the dollar, and at the same time offer the downtrodden owners a way out besides bankruptcy. It's all a matter of timing.
Then, these above mentioned assets can be put to use elsewhere in one of the many other companies they've purchased, and be used to add to the product line. Kind of like what High Standard did in it's more successful days with Auto Mag. Harry Sanford built a hell of a nice, well made pistol in the .308 Auto Mag. It was a gun way ahead of it's time. He just couldn't sell the damn thing no matter how hard he tried. Hell, even Clint Eastwood couldn't sell it! High Standard bought everything and tried to sell it under their name, i.e. "The High Standard Auto Mag Pistol". It did better, not not well enough to stay in production. Perhaps if High Standard was in better financial shape they could have produced the pistol more efficiently and marketed it better, and it would still be in production today. Point being in all of this is that a lot of good can come from these multiple acquisitions like Cerberus is doing. If they weren't around a lot of these companies like Remington would simply wither and die on the vine, their products lost forever. Cerberus, like them or not, is really giving the gun industry in this country a huge infusion of capitol. That is something that it can really absorb, especially in such a horse$h!t economy that we are all faced with today, and most likely will be for years to come. Longer everyday Hussein stays in 1600 North. Bill T.