Back in the days C= UK was dwarfed by C= Germany, and the only reason why UK stayed afloat longer was because they still had huge stocks. Just like Petro's division of selling NOS A1200 was far more profitable than anything else during Gateway and Amino-Amiga.
I guess the question is, then, how was it that C= UK managed to get such a large stockpile? Or was it a normal-sized stockpile, but seemed large relative to the shortages happening in North America, and presumably elsewhere, just prior to the bankruptcy? My utterly baseless theory is that since they actually had an understanding of marketing and retail distribution, they had enough money flowing in to keep their parts suppliers financially appeased and were able to have a more regular production schedule (at the Scotland factory, maybe?). And I thought they were able to do this because they had the most operational/financial autonomy from West Chester out of any of the international divisions. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Those guys running C= Germany ended up at Escom btw.
C= UK knew how to make alot of fuss, but they failed getting the money together for a serious bit, and buying C= would have been the cheap part of any Amiga-revival. Remember how much time effort and money Escom spent just to get the A1200 back into production and even that would have been dwarfed by the cost of actually developing an AAAA,Hombre, whatever chipset.
I think C= UK and Creative Equipment International (Commodore's US distributor) failed to realize with their bids that there would be external interest in what they believed to be an internal credit crisis. It seemed like they each had the money to pay off the creditors and stabilize the company, but didn't expect it to be acquired out from under them.
If I'm remembering correctly, Escom picked up a bunch of Commodore veterans as employees, but they didn't do much to leverage business expertise outside of Germany. I wonder if they had collaborated more with C= UK (or as someone else mentioned, C= Canada) they would have been able to get production going sooner/cheaper. That might be oversimplifying things, though, given the huge mess Mehdi Ali left behind.
Bunch of megalomaniacs.
No comment
Far more interesting is what would have been if Samsung had gone through with their bid ....
They were still a small player in the electronics market back then, were they not? I expect we would have seen something set-top-box-like, probably tied more to the chipset than the OS.
