I’m looking for a list of big firms that went under, i.e. either they went bankrupt or out of business in some sense. I’m interested especially in firms that succumbed to ordinary market forces so Texaco which went bankrupt due to a lawsuit doesn’t count and neither does Enron. Famous names that once dominated their field are ideal. Examples so far include:
KMart
Pan Am
Atari
Penn Central
Polaroid
Comments are open for your suggestions. Thanks in advance.
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Visicalc.
Wordperfect.
Compuserve.
Commodore.
Zenith Tv.All American tv brands.
Woolworth
W.T. Grant (?) (think the initials are correct)
S.S. Kresge (unless it merged)–not sure about Grant
American Motors Corporation
RKO Pictures
Woolworth still operates in Germany.
Other retailers:
Montgomery Ward
Heilig-Meyers
Service Merchandise
And for fun:
Walmart (Germany, South Korea)
Mergers and buyouts make this sort of thing complicated to score, though.
It used to be that there were frozen yogurt all over the place, at least here in Southern Cal. I think the big chain was TCBY (out of Little Rock?). I haven’t seen a TCBY in a while.
National Steel
US Steel is still major, but nowhere near the market dominating force it used to be. Antitrust basically failed against it, but time and competitors didn’t.
McDonnell Douglas was about to go bankrupt when it merged with Boeing.
In recent years, basically every single large specialty music and film retailer has gone bankrupt, some multiple times. Tower Records twice, Musicland (which owned Suncoast and Sam Goody), TransWorld Entertainment (f.y.e., Coconuts Music and Movies, Strawberries Music, Wherehouse, and others, which recently acquired Musicland), and a few others. They have mostly reorganized, merged, or sold. It’s a case of the industry itself facing problems from online sales, downloading, big-box discounters, etc.
Western Union
Western Union
DEC was bought by HP rather than going broke, but had been pretty much dismembered or closed down by that point. It was the second largest computer company, and the leader in minicomputers.
Johns Manville, Eagle-Picher, Raybestos-Manhatten and a host of industrial/construction product companies disappeared into the asbestos void.
MBH
What happened to the original 12 companies in the DJIA?
Company………………….. What Became of It
American Cotton Oil………… Distant ancestor of Bestfoods
American Sugar…………….. Evolved into Amstar Holdings
American Tobacco …………Broken up in 1911 antitrust action
Chicago Gas …………….Absorbed by Peoples Gas, 1897
Distilling & Cattle Feeding Whiskey trust evolved into Millennium Chemical
General Electric ………..Going strong and still in the DJIA
Laclede Gas Active………. removed from DJIA in 1899
National Lead …………..Today’s NL Industries removed from DJIA in 1916
North American Utility…… combine broken up in 1940s
Tennessee Coal & Iron ……..Absorbed by U.S. Steel in 1907
U.S. Leather …………….(preferred) Dissolved in 1952
U.S. Rubber Became Uniroyal…….. now part of Michelin
When Charles Dow created the Dow Jones Industrial Average, first published on May 26, 1896, it consisted of a dozen stocks.
Only one of the original 12, General Electric, is in the average today. And even GE dropped out for a while — deleted in 1898 but back nine years later as a replacement for Tennessee Coal & Iron.
U.S. Steel, run by tycoon J.P. Morgan, swallowed Tennessee Coal in a unique power play, according to historian Robert Sobel. In the panic of 1907, Mr. Morgan agreed to rescue the economy; President Theodore Roosevelt agreed not to object to the acquisition.
Several companies in the 1896 average are ancestors of firms active today (see table). American Tobacco was broken up in 1911 but was the progenitor of such companies as Fortune Brands and R.J. ReynoldsTobacco. Distilling & Cattle Feeding Co. became Distilling Co. of America, and later Millennium Chemical.
One original listing, U.S. Leather, was a preferred stock — a hybrid between a stock and a bond. Back in 1896, common stocks were considered highly speculative, Mr. Sobel says. Leather, incidentally, wasn’t just used for clothing back then: Thick leather bands were used for power transmission in factories.
American Sugar evolved into Amstar Holdings, which sold its sugar business to Britain’s Tate & Lyle PLC and eventually became part of Sweden’s Assa Abloy.
Over the years the number of components included in the average has increased from 12 to 20 to 30 as the U.S. economy has expanded. The Dow’s focus has shifted from agricultural products and basic materials such as coal, iron, lead, rubber and leather to technology companies, financial services providers, manufacturers, and retailers
Sega.
They stopped making game hardware and only make software (games).
The USSR
Sounds like an interesting paper might be coming out. There have been lots in tech land. Though not necessarily bankrupt.
Lotus and Apple were close enough for my book.
Xerox was another that was a hair from being reoganized.
Silicon Graphics (although their market was quite narrow).
The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea company was the Walmart of it’s era now it’s primarily valued in bankruptcy on its land holdings.
A counter point is how few companies survive more than 100 years. The economist had an article about how few old companies there are. Kikkomen (the soy sauce company) is several hundred years old but that was one of about 5.
For those of us who remember the CP/M days, the biggest one is Wang computers. There’s also Osborne. Both were at one time market leaders in certain sectors, and both could be said to have succumbed to “ordinary market forces.”
WorldCom. It wasn’t the fraud that did them in – it was trying to grow in a shrinking market that made them resort to fraud.
Not a lot of former industry leaders seem to have truly gone under (at least, not in my memory). Howard Johnson is a name that comes to mind. Airlines are rife with examples, of course (Pan Am, Eastern, TWA).
Does a transformation like Westinghouse’s count? How about the slow declines of Sears or A&P? Woolworth would have to be on the list. Smith Corona?
Anaconda Copper I didn’t realize it was once in the DJIA. Now no one can even operate the old mine site profitably.
Lotus (123, not cars)
AT&T
Braniff
Long Term Capital Management
Only one mention of A&P? That’s the first thing that came to my mind when I read Alex’s question.
Lynn Lopucki, a blaw prof at UCLA maintains a database of large bankruptcy cases. The address is
http://lopucki.law.ucla.edu/
This might give you a start. Thomson Financial also has a (for pay) database of bankruptcies.
I agree with Christine that Enron belongs on the list. After all, as with Worldcom, noted by trent, the company failed as a result of “normal market forces,” since that phrase surely encompasses mismanagement. That the failure was delayed by fraud really doesn’t matter.
And like alejo I expect GM to join the list fairly soon.
J. J. Newberry’s, the five-and-dime chain, was dying when it was bought out by McCrory’s, which went bankdrupt. That’s a two-fer.
No one has mentioned banks: Bank of New England, Continental Bank (in Chicago)?, and just about all of the large Texas banks from the 1980s.
Usually when you get to a thread this long, all the good answers are taken. But so far no one has mentioned “The World’s Most Unusual Lumber Yard and More”!
Hechingers.
Microsoft.
the Aerospace and Ship Building industries in general. Gone are North American, Lockheed, Grummen, Martin, McDonnell, Douglass, and Convair. Tacoma Boat, Lockheed Shipbuilding, and others have also gone away.
If you focus on this it will cause nightmares; however, the major cause is uncontrolled price increases. Price increases caused by Gold Plating, Mission creep, and unions. To be fair there is a lot of research and development costing that went into the pricing but the days of the government purchasing 2000 of anything are gone.
The R&D is spread over the purchase of 100 B2 bombers as opposed to the 2000 B47 like they purchased in the ’50s. The current class of Destroyers is armed and administered like a large cruiser of WW2. Current Cruisers are treated like WW2 Battle Ships. Except that the WW2 Battle Ships had the ability to practice without using a multi million dollar projectile, Gunners could actually get good in stead of relying on the computer to know what it is doing.
The Gold plating and mission creep was done to get the most from each purchase and not to get the price under control.
A viscous cycle if ever I saw one.
Schwinn. Interesting case – they had a hot product (the AirDyne) but wouldn’t sell it it through sporting-goods and fitness channels, because they were in thrall to their network of bike retailers.
So AirDynes gathered dust at bike dealers while fitness enthusiasts settled for second-best technologies, until the brand was sold to a Chinese outfit.
apple
Here are a few financial firms:
Drexel Burnham Lambert (Michael Milken)
Barings Bank (Nick Leeson)
Long Term Capital Management (bunch of famous PHds)
Silverado S & L (Neil Bush?)
I agree with Christine and Bernard, Enron should stay. They did not go under because of a lawsuit.
Eaton’s – retailer, department store.
In Canada we had the old catalogue department store Eaton’s founded in 1869. The downton Toronto mall might still be called the Eaton’s Centre, but it was bankrupt in 1999.
U.S. Postal Service
Xerox
Smith Corona
Schlitz Beer (or Pabst)
AT&T
IBM
Ford & GM
Eastman Kodak
Cunard Lines
Any U.S. Railroad
DEC
Wang computers
Wikipedia has an entire category about defunct companies.
Atari is a good example.
The current company called Atari is a France-based computer game company that bought up a bunch of American game publishers, like Microprose. It used to be called “Infogrames”, which it realized worked poorly in English – everyone called it “infogames”. Since one of the outfits it bought had rights to the Atari name, it renamed itself.
Pony Express.
It only operated for about a year and it wasn’t that large, but its legend lives on until this day.
Pony Express.
It only operated for about a year and it wasn’t that large, but its legend lives on until this day.
Enron had a creative business plan which simply failed (or was horribly executed). It has nothing to do with this list. If it ever had a “market leader” position, it was abandoned, not lost to “normal market forces.”
I am surprised that IBM is not mentioned more prominently here. The issue is not whether a company carries on, but whether its core business survives. Gerstner repositioned IBM as a service provider, but its core mission of selling computational machines suffered a spectacular collapse as Apple and then Clones filled the void. I’m sure there are a hundred great case studies and stores and books explaining why it happened. Maybe channel conflict, maybe culture, maybe poor management / marketing (understanding the market’s evolution).
Aren’t most cases of business failure based on a company that is unable to evolve with the market? Products become commodities, and business cannot shift their strategies to remain dominant at the new scale?
I would add AT&T and Sears. But stories of failure tend to focus on retail, don’t they? Retail evolves … companies dont. The other common stories tend to be about companies in tech sectors (e.g. communications evolved from telegraph to telephone to radio to video to computer to internet / cable, etc.). Those fast changing sectors are unique in a sense. But how many stories are there of outright collapse NOT driven by external change? I’d think the automobile cases are interesting here. Or restaurants / chains that rise and fall.
Laker Airways.
No one has mentioned banks: Bank of New England, Continental Bank (in Chicago)?, and just about all of the large Texas banks from the 1980s.
Well, in truth most of the large Texas banks were acquired. I work at one of the still-independents (Frost). One of the most major, Texas Commerce (Ben Love’s old outfit, guy was a genius), was bought by Chemical in the late 80s, then it became part of JP Morgan, which then became part of Chase. I think most of the other leaders in the state saw similar fates through Wells Fargo, B of A and the like.
Hartfield-Zody’s, which went bankrupt after employing me for a summer.
Studebaker has already been mentioned, but it deserves special mention because of it’s bankruptcy, and the loss of pensions by thousands of workers who had counted on the defined benefit plan; this prompted Congress to create the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is up to its ears in obligations.
Lockheed and Martin have gone away? I work for Lockheed-Martin. It was alleged a merger–but more of a take-over of Lockheed by Martin. Both companies were financially sound and the merged entity has a market capitalization of $37 billion–not gone away.
Ben Franklin stores. Have you seen one lately?
Chuck (above),
Continental Bank was a workout situation in the 1980s. John Doss, a very good analyst at my old firm, recommended it at $4 in June 1988, at a fraction of its BV. The company had a good franchise and was acquired by BankAmerica for $35 in 1991 or 1992, for almost a nine-bagger.
My clients were happy.
To Bob Montgomery above,
Commodore was acquired I think by a German firm that later went bankrupt.
Prime Computer also hit the skids at the same time and was acquired (or at least a piece of it was), but I forget the acquirer’s name. I’m sure you can google the history of these.
Consolidated Freightways – Unionized long haul less-than-truckload carrier – filed for bankruptcy on Labor Day in 2002 and later liquidated.
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