Chimpion

The moment you've been outbid, your legal obligations should cease. Otherwise a sneaky seller could get an accomplice to put in an outrageously high bid to find out your maximum, then cancel the bid and get a second bidder to put in a bid just below your maximum. I once had a winner cancelled and the seller offered to sell me the item for my highest bid. Given without that bidder I should have got the item much more cheaply, I declined. He relisted and I got it for much closer to the price I should have paid the first time. Given the rarity of the item, I wasn't going to cut off my nose to spite my face, although I still felt a little aggrieved.

Consider what the possibilities were : 1) company finds no buyer and disappears. 2) bought out by another model company - the rationalization may not have been a great outcome either for the staff or for us in terms of choice and pricing. 3) company bought by a non-modelling company - could have been a good or bad outcome, isn't Airfix an indication that it might well not be a good thing. 4) management buy-out 5) private equity purchase. The last two options aren't so different from one another, as management would have needed funding, which would have come from.........private equity. I see the outcome as the best result that was possible under the circumstances. At the end of the day, if Revell have a profitable business model, they'll be kept going. If they haven't, they were doomed anyway.

How exactly would they asset strip? The main asset seems to be the stock of kits. More likely they want to focus the business on what will make money in the near-term and sell them on for a profit. That may or may not be good news in the long term. The only immediate danger is that they do what Phoenix did to Rover - profiting from the debt loaded on them without any concern for the business. Maybe that's what you meant by asset stripping.

Heller did a Princess in 1:43 scale.

You've finished that really well. How did you change it from 1:24 to 1:16?

They also have very good high street visibility in Germany and Austria, with an extensive range of kits and paints in every Müller store (kind of a cross between Boots and Woolworths). If the model side really is profitable, there is an opportunity for someone here.

When we first moved out to Austria we paid for the Royal Mail to forward our post. One batch took a month and finally arrived with an Australian postmark on it..... They also managed to send us our neighbour's gas bill!

The directors are legally obliged to prioritise shareholder value. If that is in conflict with providing a product or service, they're in the wrong business.

Looks to me like you've got the handbrake on - that won't be helping

Waterfront - Simple Minds

I always think it looks very similar to a Ferrari Daytona. Didn't Heller do a 1/43rd kit of it way back?

Love that French Taxi on the front cover - think I'll wait for them to do it in 1:24 though.

Surely it should be called KitCoin

Exactly. If you already have a version A of a plane, to work out if it's worth making a version B you need to know how many will buy both, or will buy the B but wouldn't buy the A. People who would rather have the B, but would buy the A anyway and don't want two types of this plane don't help the business case for type B at all.

You may well be right, but what I don't understand is why the owners of the company (the employees) would choose a course of action which will wipe them out financially and allow someone else to profit from the ashes. Or is the ESOP just a minority of the total voting share capital? Are ESOP shares non-voting?