Two Englishmen formed the Swallow Sidecar Company in 1922 to make motorcycle sidecars. They moved into automotive coachwork and chassis, and became S.S. Cars Ltd. After World War II the initials “S.S.” fell out of favor and they became Jaguar Cars Ltd. in 1945.
Another Japanese example: Yamaha started out making musical instruments. It still has a musical instrument department (it’s the world’s largest manufacturer of musical instruments) but it’s diversified into consumer electronics and recreational vehicles.
Restoration Hardware started out as a specialy store for vintage hardware - door knobs and things. Now their main business seems to be huge grey Belgium furniture.
When I was a kid Honda was a very-well known brand of motorcycle, and that’s it, in the US, at least. When they started producing cars in the mid-70s, it seemed really weird.
Motorola started off making car radios (hence their company name) before gradually evolving into cell phones and routers.
Ball Corporation manufactured canning jars for over 100 years. It is now a major defense contractor.
The Regina Music Box company. Switched to vacuum cleaners around 1903, which kept it in business another 90 years.
Yamaha started out making pianos before moving into motorcycles.
B.S.A. was a British motorcycle manufacturer in the 1950s-1980s. IIRC they’ve since died & perhaps been reincarnated; I’m too lazy to look it up right now.
At any rate, B.S.A stands for Birmingham Small Arms. In the late 19th & early 20th century they made rifles & pistols.
From a manufacturing point of view there’s a bunch of overlap between making rifle parts & motorcycle parts. From a sales & marketing POV, not so much.
A guy I knew used to do decking installations, but the next time I met him his company was using the workshop to produce foam earplugs. Does that count?
Apple started out as a computer company. Now it is a phone company that has a sideline in making computers. There are rumors that there are going to start selling their own brand of television.
Meanwhile I read that Vizio is going to start selling desktop and laptop computers.
That’s the one I was going to mention (although I would have brought up civilian aerospace: They made the optics for the Hubble Space Telescope, for instance). And they’ve since spun off their canning jars line, so they qualify for the OP’s provision of “no longer making their original product”.
But almost all of the examples cited in this thread are companies whose focus shifted within the same category over time. Apple’s iPhone is still a computer, after all. They didn’t go from making Macs to selling shoes.
Kodak is trying to go from selling film and cameras – which were the core of their business 10 years ago – to selling inkjet printers. It’s a completely unrelated consumer product.
NM
For decades, and still today, B.S.A is most known for airguns.
It happened a lot in the early days, say late 19th century and pre-WWII 20th. It’s almost impossible to do today.
The difference is that companies back then were manufacturers. If you owned a manufacturing plant and had lots of skilled workers, you could shift from manufacturing one thing to another in a hurry. For evidence, look at WWII, during which plants essentially shut down civilian consumer product manufacturing, went over to military parts, and reconverted all within four years.
That world no longer exists. As I said in the Kodak thread, Kodak is stuck with tens of millions of square feet of manufacturing facilities that are worthless. Worse than worthless, because they cost money to maintain and tear down and remediate. Whatever Kodak switches to won’t bring that back. Therefore they’re competing in a footrace with smaller, nimbler companies despite the handicap of a millstone around their corporate neck. Any start-up who can offshore to China, or India, or Indonesia has the advantage. And the highest of high-tech industries need plants built from the ground up to suit them.
I don’t know of any comparable company that has succeeded in this in recent years, and I mean in the last decade or so. The comparison also has to be in the U.S. because as noted the way corporations are set up in Japan and Korea are wildly different from U.S. practice, not to mention U.S. culture and law. I’m 99% sure it literally can’t be done.
If you define anything with a microprocessor as a computer, then Apple could start making cars and toasters and still be in the same business. Motorola just went from radios that went in your car to radios that went in your pocket. Yamaha went from making steel frames for pianos to making steel frames for motorcycles.
Making machines to make prints from film to making inkjet printers wasn’t as big a jump as you imagine. Kodak was just trying to jump from a commercial business to a consumer business. I’d say they were trying to make less of jump than Hewlett Packard did to get into the same business. I can remember when all H-P made were the little thermal printers to to attach their lab instruments and calculators.
Most of the companies that went into a completely different business, was because they bought the company and it turned out to grow more than the main business.
If you look at the current structure of Fujifilm Holding it becomes obvious that the Fuji and Kodak plans weren’t that different, but Fuji executed better.
http://www.fujifilmholdings.com/en/business/group/index.html
What about the Hudson’s Bay Company? It started as a fur trapping and trading company, and now it’s sort of a Canadian version of Sears, though I can see how retail clothing sales might be attractive to a company that sold fur to clothing manufacturers.
Similarly B.F. Goodrich used to make rubber and tires (they advetised that they were the guys without the blimp). Now they’re a major military contractor, too.
Sometimes the other business is spun off as its own business. So Adolph Coors, the beer company in Colorado, got into the alumina crucible business and eventually spun it off as a separate company, because they still make beer.
Bausch&Lomb was an old-line optical firm, that got out of that business (telescope and binocular lenses and assemblies) entirely (they now do soft contact lenses). Not totally different, but different manufacturing technology.
I’d say that the USA stands at a threshold-do we want to cede manufacturing to China and the 3rd World? It looks like we do.
Of course, once the dollar collapses, that may change.
Oh, one other thought: Bally Mfg. used to make pinball machines-they shifted entirely to making exercise equipment.
They seem to do OK in that.