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Sounds like APR is Going Down

Bender1

Banned
Location
Doylestown, PA
The Mangrove Equity team have clearly seen an opportunity to 'grab' a good brand and good engineering team - but CEO Hooks, plus COO (Hook's best friend Johnny Petrina) have been relieved of duties, and had all management and budgetary control removed from them effective immediately. It's the classic corporate raid. Of course Hooks retains his minority shareholding and will remain in some figurehead capacity.

To clarify because the original person seems to be a little too close to look at it objectively - this is NOT a corporate raid. There are minimal physical assets to liquidate. The enthusiast community should be happy about this, it is a capital injection into a company that badly needs it. The race team, unsurprisingly, seems to have been a blackhole for capital. New ownership and C-level leadership will let them refocus on their core competencies, become profitable, and be resold at a later date to a private party or taken public.

Look at Cobb tuning. They focus on what they do any they are great at it (and make money hand over fist). This is good for the enthusiast community in the long term.
 

dasauto0108

Go Kart Champion
Location
MKE
IF (and that's a big if) his role was reduced, it could be for a few reasons, not just the content of his posts, but given the controversy that surrounded more than a few, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a contributing factor.

Given that I'm relatively new here, could someone fill me in on Arin's controversial posts? The small handful that I've read seem harmless enough, but that's not to say that all of them are. Danke :)
 
I dunno how some perceive Arin, but he's always been helpful to me. When I had a question, or concern I got a prompt, professional response. Never had a negative interaction with the guy.

That said, I hope this restructuring brings some of the pricing down on their marked up products. Some of that stuff is marked up 200%. R&D is definitely not the reason for it either. Would be better to sell your products at 50-100% mark up from cost and sell a whole lot of them than just a few here and there at 200% mark up.
 

lilfleck

Go Kart Champion
Location
NJ
Unsure on how things will play out in the short term... Long term is also questionable since we just don't know what the new management will look like. What strategy will they take?

The company that bought them is concerned about one thing: profit. How they achieve that is unknown. Will they run a lean business and squeeze resources? Will they put a large focus on customer service to ensure they maintain their customer base? Will they continue to invest into maintaining an image at all of the large car shows?

A lot of these would seem like no brainers if we were running the company, but we're not...
 

Zillon

Go Kart Champion
Location
Bucks, PA
Arin's been known to get defensive from time to time, which is his prime pitfall.

However, he knows what he's talking about, and does a great job at covering a wide variety of VW/Audi forums. It's not an easy job to handle.

As far as high markups go, that's to cover the costs of products with smaller margins due to extensive R&D time, materials, or fabrication time.
 

Zillon

Go Kart Champion
Location
Bucks, PA
And fried MED ECUs... that's install error. You can't rush the cracking of the case, and they need to be resealed properly.
 

NYCSuits

Go Kart Champion
Location
NY
WOW...you weren't lying about it getting juicy on page 3. This is pretty crazy...
 

NYCSuits

Go Kart Champion
Location
NY
:word:

Think those days are long gone now. More so that the MK7 is port flash.

I don't think they are...they still need to be cracked open

EDIT: You're right I'm wrong...I though the EU ECUs were port flashed.
 
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