Obviously, see post 48. Like said before, PGI filters should be an incentive for M+H, First Brands and Champ Labs to get some simple things fixed ... like the ruffled leaf spring issue, and also work on louver forming or go back to holes or an eCore center tube.
First Brands (Fram) bankruptcy
- Thread starter Alien
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No we don't know on the bankruptcy.
However on getting things fixed, once you loose your customer its much, much harder to get them back. Fram specifically lost shelf space at Walmart - inlcluding actually to M+H of all people, lost the M1 business to PG. I presume the big volume for Fram is the OEM business, and OEM's will not sit around and hope Fram can deliver. There likely already second sourcing on a lot of parts.
Its way easier to keep a customer than get one back - and with all the options available on a commodity product I think it will be tough - irrelevant of whom owns Fram a year from now.
Yeah, we don't have a break down of each brand under First Brands. Could be that the Fram division is doing way better than some of the other brands under First Brands. Too much speculation. It really wouldn't be that hard to rectify a few issues with the Fram line. First Brands/Fram should be putting pressure on Champ Labs about manufacturing quality. Find a new leaf spring stamper and someone who knows how to setup a louver making machine ... can't be rocket science to make a leaf spring or form louvers correctly ... leaf springs use to be super smooth before. They need some good manufacturing engineers to whip manufacturing quality in to shape.
The problem runs much deeper than oil filters. If you remember back when Motorking was around....he worked for Fram when it was owned by the Rank Group, and Bendix (allied signal) before that. First brands bought up a bunch of brands from the Rank group, and proceeded to get rid of everyone who knew what they were doing because they were expensive. This is exactly what they did when they purchased Raybestos and Centric, then took the people that had been historically worthless and promoted them. They completely ignored the aspects that had made the companies successful, and just treated it like any other brand of commodity widgets. Lots of wasted time/money on completely pointless things, Customer service was all offshored to Mexico / Romania, and anyone with any knowledge of what it is we did there was let go. Customers all started jumping ship to other suppliers. They also stopped paying their billls.
One company in particular that they bought, a few years after I'd left (I was both a customer of and a vendor to this company at this point) they immediately sent out emails announcing 200% price increases across the board, and then a few months later doubled it again. Everyone got this increase, not just me. So they basically fired all their customers.
There's tons more, but I don't know enough of the details to really comment on it. Lots of "creative" book keeping and financing to fuel more acquisitions....and then the house of cards fell down.
And in all honesty none of us would notice a difference in engine life or anything if someone put a black painted filter of an unknown major brand on our vehicles.
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That make a lot of sense, a few years back I was looking up who was the division manager & product manager of the filtration side of First Brands and the name that came up had absolutely no technical background or history related to the filtration industry. I still vaguely remember it was some old boomer in a nice suit on his linkedin photo.
All the Glassdoor reviews if any of you read them over the years pretty much was a tale tell sign of the whole thing slowly falling apart with employee reviews getting worse as time went since the acquisition of related companies by First Brands.
The guy who they made the head of the filtration division was the guy who used to be the General Manager at Powerslot 20 or so years ago when we bought them. He was worthless then and still worthless now. Every decision I watched him make was a bad one. I heard they pulled him back to try and salvage some one of the brake divisions a few years ago, but haven't heard anything since.
SammyChevelleTypeS3
$50 site donor 2023
What is scary and even very disappointing is how many other companies are doing the same exact thing it appears. It is like once they all decided and found out they can get away with making products in 3rd world countries with zero regulations or worker protections paying the lowest wages they can in many places, they seem to have gone cheapo with parts and quality as well. Many of them must figure in lots of cases.... "well, you gotta buy from us no matter what garbage we produce. where else you gonna go when we own all our competition now too?" If or when those type go under I applaud because they have already stepped on and pulled the rug out from so many to get to where they got before the fall. Sad part lots of times is the managers who did the plundering are long gone with bonus bags of monies and perks before the collapses they set in motion.
I’ve said this before, companies aren’t even loyal to themselves and their brands. So why should I be.
NAPA dropped Mann Hummel after them being a sole supplier since the sixties because of extremely poor order fill as in 40% shipping at best sometimes so they had no filters to sell and told the Germans we will not sell oil with no filters to sell anymore and canned the partnership. The Germans drove the Wix deal in to the ground over mismanagement with NAPA and other buyers and it made no sense the way they ran the business and not sure they can ever get it back. NAPA was their largest account by far and they ruined it over not providing product which was a not acceptable.
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And let’s say as a consumer one doesn’t really care about brands or quality and only cares about price and availability.
Ex: the Fram EG 9688 is $6.99 and the Supetech ST9688 is $3.85 currently at my local Walmart.
Why pay more for the same or lesser quality from a budget filter just because of the Fram name?
It was actually Wix (when they were good) until 2016 when Mann-Hummel bought up Wix.
NAPA dropped them long after Wix got bought and was directly a Mann Hummell problem as this all happened in the last couple years all because of poor performance as a supplier
Yeah, I know … it took a while for NAPA to see the change occur after M-H acquired Wix in 2016. It's your statement that Mann-Hummel supplied NAPA since the 60s that I was commenting on because that's not true.
We had a lot of problems getting some Napa Gold filters. A part number would go unavailable for a few months and when it came back the filter had been cheapened up terribly.
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Here’s a few more details from the WSJ today.
Auto-parts supplier First Brands Group filed for bankruptcy Monday, threatening big losses for its lenders after the market lost confidence in its financial disclosures and its use of off-balance-sheet debt.
The privately held company is bringing on independent directors to examine the off-balance-sheet financing arrangements, which total in the billions, people familiar with the matter said.
First Brands enters chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston with an agreement from a group of senior lenders to provide a $1.1 billion loan to finance the proceedings, the company said in an announcement.
First Brands had been working an effort to refinance its $6 billion of corporate debt that fizzled last month after lenders demanded more details about the company’s earnings and factoring agreements, a type of supply-chain financing in which third-party investors assume payment streams and obligations.
Investors also became skittish as they learned that Apollo Global Management, the asset-management giant, had earlier bet against First Brands by purchasing credit-default swaps on the company’s debt. First Brands’ loans cratered in value in recent weeks, marking one of several troublesome developments for the strained automotive industry.
That is pretty disgusting. The last bit.
Why? There are two sides to every trade. Not that I would defend Apollo in general.
I don't disagree, but just ethically it bugs me, betting against..........with intent of making money. OK. But driving down value....for what? Sometimes it's not just money.
