| To: richardred who wrote (4475) | 6/12/2017 1:02:32 PM | | From: richardred | | | | Federal Signal Completes Acquisition of Truck Bodies & Equipment
Federal Signal has completed its acquisition of Truck Bodies and Equipment (TBEI) for $270 million.
June 04, 2017
Federal Signal has completed its acquisition of Truck Bodies and Equipment (TBEI) for $270 million.
TBEI manufactures dump truck bodies and trailers.
According to Federal SIgnal's president/CEO, Jennifer Sherman, the TBEI products allow the company to diversify further into maintenance and infrastructure markets.
Source: Federal Signal
constructionequipment.com |
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| To: richardred who wrote (4475) | 6/12/2017 1:11:22 PM | | From: richardred | | | | Atlas Copco’s sale of Road Construction Equipment leads to establishment of Dynapac SA
Published: 15 May 2017
The Atlas Copco Group has sold its global Road Construction Equipment Division, including the Dynapac brand name, to the number one construction Group in France and world-leader in road construction equipment, Fayat Group.
 The Road Construction Equipment division became part of Atlas Copco‘s Construction Technique business area in 2007 and manufactures Compaction Rollers for asphalt and soil application, as well as asphalt equipment Planers and Pavers. The products are well known globally under the Dynapac trade name.
Founded in 1957, Fayat is a 100% independent family owned Group with an international scope in 120 countries and representation by 152 companies around the world. Fayat has earned a reputation for being a dedicated and reputable original equipment manufacturer through eleven road construction equipment companies and dedicated brands active in this area.
Dynapac will transfer to Fayat on 1 July 2017 and become a company within the Group operating under the Dynapac brand name. Following the acquisition, road construction equipment which forms one of the Group’s seven core businesses – public works, foundations, building, energy services, steel and mechanical construction and pressure vessels – will become the strongest division in the Fayat Group.
Middle East Africa will be one of eleven regional Dynapac business areas globally, with sales and service operations in 37 countries together with five global production facilities being Brazil, Sweden, Germany, India and China. The global holdings company will be based in Sweden and the divisional management head office in Germany. Dynapac has 1 265 employees with revenues of approximately MSEK 2 900 (MEUR 309) for 2016. Once all due diligences have been finalized, Dynapac SA will be a local legal company responsible for the Southern Africa territory within the MEA region and the head office based in Dubai.
“This is an ownership change and not a change in business structure,” says Neville Marthinussen, Atlas Copco Construction Technique Business Line Manager, Dynapac Road Construction Equipment. “Until closure, the Road Construction Equipment Division will remain part of Atlas Copco’s Construction Technique Business Area. So it is business as usual,” Marthinussen assures customers. “As Dynapac South Africa we will continue to serve the market with our products and services. The current product portfolio remains unchanged and all scheduled product renewals will continue as planned.” Marthinussen confirms that the Atlas Copco name will gradually be phased out to end 2017 and the Dynapac brand will be prominently displayed on all products come 2018.
Fayat has plans to further strengthen its strategic position in road construction and road maintenance equipment. “The Group’s reputation as a world-leader in road construction equipment with over 60 years’ experience, presents a solid platform on which we are able to reinforce the strength of the Dynapac brand through continued development, improvement and expansion of our Dynapac product ranges and services that have clearly earned the respect and trust of our customers over many years,” concludes Marthinussen.
crown.co.za |
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| To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (4479) | 6/16/2017 10:17:55 AM | | From: richardred | | | | It might be awhile for another Amazon food acquisition. For the record, I don't think that will be the last one. Wegmans is privately held and fits the mold also. It's slowly expanding along the east coast.
P.S. Picture of my wife holding up the paper of the new proposed Wegmans North Carolina store. This while we were shopping there that day.
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| To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (4479) | 6/16/2017 12:17:24 PM | | From: richardred | | | | Walmart not playing dead.
Walmart acquires menswear online retailer Bonobos.Walmart is buying menswear online seller Bonobos, intensifying retail competition with Amazon on the same day its archrival announced its acquisition of Whole Foods.
The nation's largest retailer said Friday that it would pay $310 million for Bonobos, which also has 35 brick-and-mortar shops, as it continues to scoop up niche retail sites.
The move was immediately overshadowed by Amazon's seismic acquisition of Whole Foods, sending Walmart shares down 5.2% in early trading to $74.84.
But it reflects Walmart's bid to grow its customer base into niche areas where its stores are not as strong. The company said it would offer Bonobos brands through its recently-acquired Jet.com division and "possibly other Walmart brands in a variety of countries over time."
"Bonobos is a brand with loyal customers, premium price points, and expertise in a differentiated niche,'' said Stephen Beck, managing partner of management consultancy cg42. "It attracts exactly the kind of buyer who does not frequent Walmart today.
In recent months, Walmart has begun to offer free two-day shipping for a minimum purchase of $35, and sought to leverage its network of locations by offering a discount on thousands of online-only products if customers are willing to pick them up at a local store.
At the same time, it has been enhancing its online offering by buying other sites. In August, it acquired the online marketplace, Jet, for $3 billion and made that company's top executive, Marc Lore, the CEO of e-commerce for Walmart in the U.S.
The latest addition to the Walmart digital team is Bonobos CEO and founder Andy Dunn, who will oversee Walmart's digital brands.
“Adding innovators like Andy will continue to help us shape the future of Walmart, and the future of retail," Lore said in a statement. "I’m thrilled to welcome Andy and the entire Bonobos team. They’ve created an amazing product and customer experience, and that will not change. In fact, Andy will be a great influence on the company, especially in leading our collection of exclusive brands offered online.”
In December, Jet bought online footwear seller ShoeBuy for roughly $70 million. Two months later, Walmart scooped up Moosejaw, an online outdoor gear and clothing retailer. And in March, Walmart announced that it had purchased ModCloth, an online seller of women’s clothing and accessories that targets customers looking for full sizes.
"Apparel and accessories are now the number one category for digital commerce,'' Ravi Jariwala, a Walmart spokesman, said in an interview prior to the Bonobos announcement. "So with so many customers shopping there. as you’re looking to grow your e-commerce presence, it’s important to be where your customers are . . . . And at the same time these acquisitions do allow us to reach essentially new customers that may have not shopped within our ecosystem in the past.''
Along with potentially ushering new customers into the Walmart fold, the new sites provide deep wells of expertise about products ranging from shoes to apparel, and Walmart has kept the sites' management teams and staffs intact.
The Boston-based ShoeBuy, for instance, kept its CEO Mike Sorabella and staff of roughly 200. ModCloth CEO Matthew Kaness is still in place. And Moosejaw CEO Eoin Comerford and his team are still at the helm of their outdoor-focused site.
"Think about the expertise these teams inherently bring,'' Jariwala said. "Moosejaw has been in business almost 25 years and focused that entire time on the outdoor space so they have deep industry knowledge, deep industry relationships . . . The type of content, visuals, product descriptions you need to sell something like specialty apparel is different than the content you need to sell a video player or box of diapers.''
usatoday.com |
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| To: richardred who wrote (4483) | 6/16/2017 12:23:42 PM | | From: Glenn Petersen | | | | The race is on:
Amazon wants to become Walmart before Walmart can become Amazon
by Sarah Perez ( @sarahintampa)
TechCrunch
June 16, 2017
The future of retail will be a combination of both online e-commerce and a brick-and-mortar retail presence – as recent moves from both Walmart and Amazon have shown, including today’s back-to-back announcements from the two rivals, which sees Amazon buying a chain of popular grocery stores with a Whole Foods deal for $13.7 billion, and Walmart picking up yet another online apparel vendor with Bonobos for $310 million.
Walmart is the only retailer with the size, scale and funds to take on Amazon, and it’s been making aggressive moves to compete with Amazon’s online business for years. Amazon, on the other hand, has been trying to figure out how to merge brick-and-mortar stores into its world of online shopping.
The question is, which retailer will figure out the perfect mix of online and offline, and get there the quickest?
As of late, Walmart been targeting Amazon’s Prime business – launching free, two-day shipping on millions of items, without requiring an annual membership, for example. The move hasn’t been lost on Amazon, which in turn has gone directly after the Walmart shopper, by making it easier for lower-income consumers to pay with cash on its site. It even discounted Prime for those on government assistance, arguing that a Prime membership is not a luxury, but a need.
The truth is, Amazon needs to capture the Walmart shopper as it has saturated the middle to high-end of the market with Prime memberships; approximately 60% of U.S. households now have Prime, with lower-income households the only place it can still grow Prime stateside.
Beyond its Prime cash cow, Amazon has also made moves to better tackle the grocery business – a tough area to compete as an online-only retailer, given the need to keep fresh items cold, and others frozen. Amazon has slowly ramped up in this area over the years via its delivery service AmazonFresh, but it has not been able to widely scale grocery deliveries due to the logistics and economics (or “ enormous money pit,” more colloquially) involved with delivering perishable items.
Here, however, Walmart has an advantage. It has stores within 10 miles of 90% of American shoppers, and has quickly expanded its service that lets online customers place orders online to pick up curbside at their nearest store. It’s even trialing drive-up grocery pickup kiosks, to make the process easier.
Amazon, on the other hand, is still a relative newcomer to brick-and-mortar retail, compared with Walmart. Though it just opened its own drive-up grocery pickup service in Seattle, many of its effort in brick-and-mortar feel more experimental.
For example, it’s trying out physical bookstores in major markets around the U.S., which also double as a gadgets showcase as well as a test of using online purchase data to inform store inventory selections. It’s also testing a new smart convenience store format with its cashier-free “Go” convenience stores, which could give it another angle into the grocery business.
But Amazon doesn’t have the wealth of institutional knowledge about physical retail, much less real-world grocery stores, like Walmart does. That’s why it makes sense that it’s today making a huge grab for a grocery retailer like Whole Foods – not only does that give Amazon the edge when competing against the likes of delivery startups like Instacart and Shipt in home grocery delivery (in fact it now owns a part of Instacart, thanks to Whole Foods), but it also gives Amazon a nationwide retail footprint to take on Walmart in grocery pickup.
As Amazon tries to figure out retail stores, Walmart is learning how to leverage its existing brick-and-mortar retail stores as a means of pulling customers away from Amazon. Walmart today is incentivizing online shoppers to drop by a store to pick up their items in order to lower the ticket price, and it’s now turning its store staff into delivery drivers who can drop off online orders as soon as the next day.
What both retailers understand is that shopping will not fully transition online – at least not in the foreseeable future; nor will it operate entirely offline, either. It needs to be a mix. There are times when people still want to shop out in the real world – whether that’s because they like the experience of seeing products in their hand, because it can be more convenient or even just quicker to just shop in a store at times, rather than searching a website and waiting for delivery.
While Amazon is putting up stores – and now buying a whole host of them through Whole Foods, Walmart is figuring out how to make its online catalog more competitive. Ahead of today’s Bonobos deal, it’s been making strategic acquisitions in one of the fastest-growing categories of online shopping – apparel – in addition to having beefed up its tech team by spending $3 billion on Jet.com, led by Marc Lore.
Lore, of course, is the entrepreneur crazy enough to take on Amazon not once, but twice – first with Quidsi (Diapers.com’s parent company), and then Jet. And Jet’s innovation in exposing the underlying logistics of online shopping through its “Smart Cart” technology – which rewarded shoppers with savings for buying from nearby warehouses, or shipping items together, among other things – has since been translated to Walmart through the new “Pickup Discount” program.
Both systems approach the problem of bringing the costs of e-commerce down by allowing the customer to make choices about what they’re willing to do to lower item prices. In Walmart’s case, those choices are more about how to bring its retail stores into that equation.
In addition, through its Jet.com subsidiary, Walmart is snagging online businesses that can help it better compete with Amazon in areas where it may lack inventory. Jet acquired acquired home goods store Hayneedle, a Zappos competitor called ShoeBuy, and clothing retailer ModCloth, while its parent Walmart just last month bought outdoor retailer Moosejaw, which also has physical stores.
Several of these moves are about Walmart expanding its position in apparel, now the largest category for online retail, according to comScore. Amazon has been approaching this category from another angle – making its own-label fashion items, including workout clothing, bras, and men’s shirts, for instance.
However, apparel sales are still challenging online, due to sizing issues, fit, and the high cost of managing returns. As Walmart inches into apparel through its combination of offline/online clothing shops, it can do things like offer try-on, pickup and returns of online apparel at local stores. Amazon, on the other hand, doesn’t have a clothing retail presence. But maybe that’s next, given how quickly these two are matching each others’ moves.
techcrunch.com |
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