Word: genmar
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Half a million for a fishing contest? Sounds crazy. Absolutely, says Irwin Jacobs, the genial chairman of Genmar Holdings Inc., which owns the FLW Tour: that's hardly enough money. So Jacobs is raising the big prize to $1 million next year and promising a celebrity pro-am, the Pebble Beach of angling. "Nobody ever believed we could do this," says Jacobs, a man not unacquainted with hyperbole. "But we're not anywhere near where we're going to be in 10 years...
Beyond the hoopla was the naked quest for sales. And it turns out the bassfest was good business all around. Genmar, Jacobs' boatbuilding company, moved more boats; Ranger continues to gain share in a flat market. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, got a boost because fishing made its stores more attractive to men, who have a tendency to shop well beyond Department 9--sporting goods--and visit other parts of the store...
...companies are growing so fast that they will begin to clash directly, although, as Hagale says, it's a big country. The boat business doesn't have clear sailing either. Industry leader Brunswick is on a vertical-integration tear, a strategy that brought another firm, Outboard Marine, into bankruptcy. Genmar stepped in to feed on the remains, but Jacobs warns that a further shakeout looms in a market that is stagnant at about 300,000 units annually and getting hurt by gas prices...
...boat industry was in another of its typically brutal down cycles in the early 1990s when Irwin Jacobs decided that his business didn't have to be so sink-or-swim. Lured with the right bait, Irwin figured, fishermen could offer his company, Genmar Holdings Inc., a buffer of steady, stable growth. After all, the U.S. is a nation of fishing fools--a group estimated to be 55 million strong that buys $40 billion in equipment each year, from rods to reels to tackle boxes. Jacobs, 60, saw a rare and untapped bounty. "I don't make a hundred bets...
Although technically he works for Genmar, Kirila figures that at some point his company, now called VEC Technology Inc., will go public. For the present he has a mandate to spread the gospel of digital manufacturing and fund start-up companies that aim, as he puts it, "to raise the clock speed of manufacturing culture." Jacobs is planning to do what Kirila originally intended: to lease the patented VEC system in the same way that Pitney Bowes used to lease stamp machines. "We're proving we can do it better, kinder, cleaner," says Jacobs, who has lost none...