Winchester is back in business..

[Willie]

Winchester and Browning Enter Firearms License Agreement


8/15/2006

East Alton, IL, August 15, 2006 --Winchester announced today that it has entered into a long-term license agreement with Browning for the manufacture and distribution of Winchester brand rifles and shotguns. “With this new agreement, Winchester is confident that Browning will produce innovative firearms worthy of the Winchester name, continuing a tradition that people around the world associate with the Winchester brand,” stated Richard Hammett, President Winchester Ammunition. “We are proud of our heritage as The Gun That Won the West and consider this arrangement as entering a new era for the legendary Winchester firearms brand.”Charles Guevremont, President of Browning is equally optimistic and excited about the opportunity to continue the production and distribution of Winchester firearms. “We are more committed today than ever before to the development of exciting new Winchester firearms designs,” said Guevremont. “We will continually strive to build the quality products that generations of loyal Winchester customers have come to expect and will be proud to own and use for decades to come.” Winchester is a division of Olin Corporation. Olin Corporation is a manufacturer concentrated in three business segments: Metals, Chlor Alkali Products and Winchester. Winchester products include sporting ammunition, reloading components, small caliber military ammunition and industrial cartridges. For more information on Winchester products, including press releases and images, visit www.winchester.com, and then click on Press Room. For more information on Winchester firearms, including press releases and images, visit www.winchesterguns.com.

http://www.winchester.com/pressroom/news/pressreleases/releasedetail.aspx?storyid=172

[quackrstackr]

To be honest, that whole closure thing never did really make any sense to me.

Supposedly it closed, but I was still getting emails from them, you could still buy ammunition, the brand new Super X3 shotgun came out after the closure and you could buy them most anywhere, etc.

My take on it was that pretty much the only thing that shut down was the actual rifle plant and headquarters, but all these press releases were written as though the entire thing was folding camp.. which was not the case.

The Super X2 shotguns and the Browning Gold are nearly identical, leading me to believe that they were already in cahoots anyway. Not sure what is different after this announcement.

[trust me]

Yeah, they're in cahoots. The Win shotguns weren't made at the rifle plant. The only items lost were the M94 and the M70 and both are too valuable to sit long. The shotguns will still be made in Japan along with the Browning guns and now the rifles will too.

The Winchester Ammo line was separated from the guns way back in the early 80's. It took a lot of wheeling and dealing to allow the Winchester name to even appear on the rifles, since they were made by USRAC.

Fact is, designing and manufacturing guns isn't a great way to make money. Winchester was almost broke back in 63 and it never really got any better, leading up to the restructure in the 80s. Union labor, product liability and the fact that guns don't wear out; not many people buy a new gun even as often as they buy a new car. Plus the fact that the shooting community has shrunk.

[daking]

Trust me is real close to the mark. At some time in the deep, dark past, Olin Corp bought the Wincherster business which consisted of Wincherster-Western ammo and United States Repeating Arms Corporation which manufactured many of the Oliver Winchester designed weapons. After several re-structurings and changes, it became apparent that the USRA plant in New Haven, Ct. was outmoded, their UAW contracts onerous and were being beaten to death by overseas competition and innovative manufacturers like Sturm Ruger. In the early eighties, Olin was courting suitors to buy USRA or alternatively, close it. It was an employee buyout that separated USRA from Olin and Winchester. Part of the deal was USRA's ability to use the Winchester name and distinctive logo. Olin still made the ammo and I believe retained the rights to some of the shotguns.

USRA was undercapitalized and could not become competitve fast enough to save itself. It was then bought by Fabrique National, (FN), the company that owns Browning. They made many of the Winchester lines for a while. Some of you might remember a time when the Winchester M70 was available with the Browning BOSS system and a reintroduction of the Model 12 by Browning on a limited basis.

It appears that Browning is going to reintroduce some of the Winchester mainstays, made in either Japan or Belgium. I believe that Miroku in Japan makes weapons for FN. I suspect that's why the SX-M3 and the Browning Gold are so similar. In short, the Winchester name, cachet and logo were to valuable to abandon and the products too expensive to make in anything but an extremely modern plant.

Another interesting parallel is Remington. For years, Remington Arms and Remington-UMC ammo were owned by DuPont. Now, they are owned by a group of their employees. I suspect that both Olin and DuPont started these vertically intergrated companies in order to provide the tools for people to use the thing on which they made their real money, gunpowder.
As a side note, my great aunt (who raised my father, his brother and sisters) supported the brood as an ammunition tester for Remington in Bridgeport. Part of Aunt Kay-Kay's job was sitting in the basement of the Remington plant, shooting. Damn, I guess I come by it honestly.

The future of many of the most venerable sporting arms designs will rest upon modern manufacturing techniques and offshore labor. The M70, the M12, the M23the M94 Winchesters, any true Mauser action and a whole lot others are very labor intensive. Unless a company has a vast supply of cheap, skilled labor or invests in the automated equipment to perform the high tolerance fitting that these weapons require, they will die a death of over-pricing. Great pieces like the old M88 Winchester lever action have languished because it's just too expensive to make. The weapons our kids buy to pass down to their grandkids will likely be much more sophisticated in terms of manufacture than the ones we received from our elders. It's a pity, but it's a fact of life.