@bigkid posted:Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. When you say MTH is worth a fortune, it could be that if you look at the tooling and the factory they own and the intellectual property and the current sales it is worth on the books X millions/hundreds of millions, but in the end it comes down to what someone is willing to pay for it. Sometimes companies buy the assets of another company to introduce it into their product line, sometimes they buy the assets of another company for other reasons, perhaps for patents the company owns, perhaps simply for the name (for example, Japanese companies bought the names of famous clock/watch companies like Elgin, Ingraham and the like, and turned out cheap watches/clocks with those names on them. If no one wants to buy a company, in the end that means it isn't worth a fortune, it means it has no value in terms of being an ongoing business, at least not in the eyes of those who could buy it. Obviously after so many pages of discussion about this we come back to one fundamental point, at this point the only thing we know is that a)Mike plans to walk away next year b)DCS will be supported in some fashion and c)as of this writing, there is no white knight out there to buy the business.
As The New York Times reported a few months ago, a company that made expensive ventilators bought up a smaller company that was working on a cheaper medical ventilator, then shut down the smaller company. Competitor eliminated!
Likewise, some train manufacturer could do the same with MTH.
In the publishing field, Simon & Schuster bought up several smaller companies (Green Tiger Press, Avery Publishing, others), closed them down, made all their books out of print, took a few titles they wanted and merged them into their own publishing company. This stuff happens All The Time, *sigh*...
