Inspired by a recent threat about Kodak (which i thought no longer existed) recently got a big Government contract to produce pharmaceutical ingredients.
What other big industrial corporations still linger on in one form or the other?
My first thought was “Westinghouse”, a few spinoffs still exist, including a Nuclear power company ( i think), but certainly not “Westinghouse” as a household name for electronic products. I have purchased a “Westinghouse” TV but i’m pretty sure they just paid whoever owns the brand name to slap the label on the product.
Same goes for RCA, it may still exist in some form as NBC/Universal/Comcast, but they stopped making actual TVs decades ago. I havent seen any RCA products recently, but its seems to me they existed for a long time after the RCA corporation actually closed its factories.
Someone seems to try to start a new Pan Am airline once a decade, i assume somebody owns the name Pan Am.
The Pan Am name is actually now owned by a railroad in New England. The railroad’s parent company operated an airline using the name about a decade ago, flying a couple of old 727s on oddball routes along the east coast. They were kind of famous among airplane enthusiasts for being the last airline in the US flying 727s. The airline shut down in 2008 at the start of the recession.
There was also a startup airline called Eastern Air Lines a few years ago. They only ever were a charter carrier, although they aspired to move into scheduled service. They got bought out by another charter airline which IIRC kept the Eastern name.
Moving to other industries, the Atari brand is still around, apparently. They were briefly owned by Hasbro, now it apparently belongs to a French company formerly called Infogames. According to Wikipedia (and I kind of remember hearing about this on the public radio show Marketplace), they actually plan to build Atari hotels.
ETA: Schwinn bicycles might be considered another one. The “real” Schwinn went out of business decades ago. A Chinese company bought the trademark in the late 1990s. So the Schwinn bikes you see in the store are made by a completely different company that the Schwinns you might remember from the 1960s and 70s.
If you’re older, you may remember them from such products as film projectors in schools.
They were in film-related business areas for almost 100 years before selling pieces off (to Kodak, among others) and turning into an business automation company.
And then there’s also a “Bell + Howell” brand that appears to be completely unrelated corporately to the old company and sells infomercial crap mostly around lighting, and cameras, obviously capitalizing on the old name association.
I didn’t look into how or whether they acquired the rights to use that name as a brand or whether they just went ahead and named themselves that or whether there was ever any trademark fight about the difference between “&” and “+”.
Some other company bought the RCA trademark and is selling appliances under that brand. RCA no longer exists as a company.
It’s like what RealityChuck said about GE earlier. GE has sold off so many of its divisions in recent years that now pretty much any consumer product you buy with a GE logo on it is actually made by someone other than GE.
I got one detail wrong there. The brand belongs to a Canadian company that imports Chinese bikes; the company itself is not Chinese. But the gist is the same – modern Schwinn bikes are just Chines bikes with the Schwinn name slapped on them, with no relation to the original Schwinn company.
Securities bought Pinkerton years ago, as far as I know the only remnant is a Securitas branch that still uses the name in Jacksonville FL
As far as I know the only remnant of Abercrombie and Fitch is a T-shirt company that used their logo.
Similarly, Packard Bell was originally a US brand of radios. An Israeli investor group bought the rights to the name from Teledyne, and used it on inexpensive personal computers, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, likely benefiting from both some residual name recognition, as well as confusion with Hewlett-Packard, and the various Bell telecommunications companies.
A relatively fresh zombie is 20th Century Fox. Disney acquired the brand and dropped the word “Fox” from all the divisions. Now it’s just 20th Century and Searchlight
Some other old airline names – Piedmont and Pacific Southwest Airlines. Both airlines merged with USAir in the 1980s, and they continued using the names for their regional subsidiaries. A few more mergers later, American Airlines still maintains subsidiaries called Piedmont and PSA, IIRC in order to keep the rights to the trademarks and prevent another airline from using them.