Reading this thread on Blockbuster made me wonder whether there are that many big companies that have successfully pivoted and had a major overhaul of their business model, and how many companies have attempted a pivot and failed.
Kodak seems like a classic case of the latter, though it seems like its downfall is more complicated than many people present it as. I’m wondering if GE might be a case of both massive success and subsequent massive failure that resulted from the same huge expansion of its financial services division in the late 90’s/early 2000’s - though their current struggles may not necessarily be linked to that since I think they shed a lot of their financial services business over the last decade. Also since it’s a company that has its fingers in so many different industries it’s not necessarily the best example of a company that “pivoted” so much as changed its asset allocation.
I’m curious as well since a number of oil companies such as Shell are looking to transition to be “energy” companies instead of just oil companies - is there any chance they could actually succeed at this?
Ohmigarsh, I saw the title and said “I’m going to jump on that thread and tell my Kodak stories!”
Never been ninja’d by the first post before… but it was so frustrating watching Kodak’s inability to catch a vision of what the world of photography would be like in the Oughts. So read that (quick, concise) article. I agree completely, except that it was All Of The Above, missing the mark on many fronts.
Nintendo used to be a playing card company before it pivoted to video games/consoles and found much more success there.
Suzuki started as a company that made weaving looms, but now is mainly known for being a manufacturer of motor vehicles.
As for failed pivots, most of them are no-name startups whose stories are lost to history, but I recall AOL tried pivoting away from being an Internet provider to being a digital media company instead, which didn’t go so hot before it got acquired by Verizon in 2015.
Sears, at one time, was known for its catalog sales. Order through the catalog, pick it up at a store (free) or have it delivered to your home (for a slight charge). They ended their Big Book in 1993, at the start of the Internet age. Just before Amazon started.
Yeah, Sears always struck me as a company that could have played off their previous mail-order history right into being a large scale, if not dominant web retailer. But by the time that internet retailing really took off (early 2000s I’d say), then it was already too late. Personally, I thought Sears should have taken advantage of their network of stores by letting you ship-to-store like you had been able to through tehe catalog- had they done that, they’d have had a leg up on everyone else charging you shipping fees.
Also… I want to make a point that conglomerates like GE are kind of hard to gauge. Did they successfully pivot by divesting some companies and buying others? It’s hard to say.
I think Humana has to be in the running for successful pivoting. First it was a nursing home company for about 15-20 years, then it owned/ran hospitals for another 15-20, and is now a health insurance company.
Nintendo started as a card company, but they’d diversified long before entering the video game industry. Video games weren’t a pivot, so much as an expansion - they were a toy company, primarily, and video games were simply a new incarnation of that.
(Also, while attempts to expand out of their core businesses tended to fail, they were always successful at their strength.)
Has IBM done any “pivoting”? On one hand, they have always been in the data processing business. On the other hand, they have been faced with all sorts of strategic decisions, like rolling out the System/360, or, more recently, selling server and personal computer lines to Lenovo.
Dintaifung was a company that specialized in selling cooking oil. They didn’t do well. They then transformed into a restaurant, selling steamed xiaolungbao dumplings, and became hugely popular, regarded as perhaps the best xiaolungbao restaurant chain in the world.
Abercrombie and Fitch was a sports equipment company before becoming a leader in teen fashion. I believe they’ve kind of fallen out of favor lately, but that’s a very fickle business to begin with. Perhaps they will revitalise themselves again post Covid
I was going to mention IBM. They came to prominence selling “big iron” computers, and expanded that into personal computers and laptops in the '80s and '90s. But, selling hardware is now apparently a fairly small part of their business (and, as you note, they got out of the PC business entirely), as they focus on cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and consulting services.
I would like to mention Nokia, who “started 150 years ago as a pulp mill and had long been assotiated with cables and rubber”, then went on to be one of the greatest in communication industries who almost single handedly made mobile phones what they became only to lose badly to Apple when they made that better: one successful pivot and a failure, all in under 30 years.
One of the most bizarre examples is when Kinney Parking Company merged with National Cleaning Contractors in 1966. Not even a year later the company bought out National Periodical Publications (aka, DC Comics.) Then they bought Panavision. After that, they bought Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, which included Atlantic Records. Then they bought Elektra Records. In 1971 they spun off the parking and cleaning business to focus on media and entertainment and eventually became Time Warner.
This is correct. The original A&F went out of business in 1977. Oshman’s Sporting Goods bought the brand name and revived it in 1978, then sold the name to The Limited in 1988, and it’s Limited which changed A&F to a youth fashion brand.
They successfully made the transition from electro-mechanical tabulating machines, to electronic computers that used their excellent card machines for input, to electronic computers using their excellent tape and disk hardware.
Intel was the first one I thought of, but I see I’ve been beaten to the punch.
Studebaker made horse drawn carriages in the 19th century, then switched to making cars at the dawn of the 20th. And they were reasonably successful for the first half of the 20th century until they got pummeled by the Big Three in the 1950s and 60s.
If I remember correctly Peugeot was a bicycle company before they started making cars.