Wellllll, for some definition of “known”, I guess. I think most people with any awareness at all of Singer sewing machines have no idea that the company ever manufactured firearms.
Anyway, the following doesn’t count as disparate “products” so much as rather disparate “identities”, I guess? Namely, the Indian automotive manufacturing behemoth Tata Motors makes not only the iconically Indian Tata cars and commercial trucks, but also… the iconically British Jaguar and Land Rover automobiles. Who knew.
Speaking of sewing machines, Japan’s Brother Industries, best known for making office equipment (formerly including typewriters, now most famously printers), machine tools and manufacturing equipment, starting out as a sewing machine manufacturer and still makes a good line of home machines.
Tata Group is a ginormous holding company that has been buying random unrelated businesses all over the world for decades. A classic do-everything conglomerate which is much more financial engineering than business acumen.
They bought Land Rover and Jaguar out of bankruptcy for a few rupees. And operate it/them as separate businesses unrelated to Tata Motors except for lines of reporting.
Maybe it has been mentioned already, but (and I didn’t know this till a couple years ago) Morton-Thiokol, of solid-rocket booster fame, the Morton part of it is the salt people. “When it Rains, it Pours”.
Morton and Thiokol split in 1989, but prior to that, they also made ski-lift equipment and Snowcats, large tracked vehicles for use at ski resorts and other snowy applications.
Yeah, a lot of stuff seems kind of obvious from the outside, and especially in hindsight. But I figure it’s got to be a much different call when you’re inside the company and you’re in charge.
I mean, in graduate business school (MBA) in 2002-2003, I remember writing two papers that stood out in my mind, because they made predictions that came true. Mostly because from the business school perspective, these things were super obvious.
In one situation (video rental vs. streaming), it was resistance to change and doubling down on the current business, and the other (photography companies) was far more of a situation where they saw the tsunami coming, but there was nowhere to flee. I mean, there wasn’t too much Nikon (or Canon, Olympus, Pentax, or Minolta) could have done in the face of the mass shift to smartphone cameras by the non-hobbyist public. What we suggested was for those companies to license their names and potentially technology to smartphone companies- maybe someone would be excited about maybe having a Nikon lens or something on their Motorola phone, vs. whatever the iPhone had. But even that wouldn’t offset the crash of an industry that sold 120 million cameras a year into one that sells 7 million 20 years later.
I just got an email about a company getting into a niche market you wouldn’t expect. Sig Sauer is now making (or at least licensing) martial arts uniforms and gear. I suppose they’re trying to appeal to the tough guy’s Tough Guy.
I think Mercedes Benz makes most of the public city buses in Germany; at least I saw a lot of their buses when I was there. Obviously it’s just another kind of motor vehicle, but not the sort of thing we associate with with the brand in the United States.
