Amstrad

» see amstrad.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Amstrad was registered in 1968 as AMS Trading (Amstrad) Limited, the letters taken from the initials of its twenty one year old founder, Alan Michael Sugar. The first products were car aerials and hi-fi accessories, and the method that would define the company showed up immediately. Amstrad injection molded its turntable covers while competitors vacuum formed theirs, which was cheaper per unit at volume and let it undercut them on the shelf. Amplifiers and tuners followed, imported from East Asia and badged for the British market. The company floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1980 and roughly doubled in size every year through the early part of that decade.

The computers arrived in 1984. The CPC range was aimed straight at Commodore and Sinclair, and the PCW range that followed in 1985 put a word processor and its printer in one box at a price small businesses would actually pay. On 7 April 1986 Amstrad bought the worldwide rights to sell and manufacture every existing and future Sinclair computer, along with the Sinclair name, for £5 million. The deal included Sinclair's unsold stock and Amstrad made back more than the purchase price on that stock alone. Later the same year the PC1512 shipped at £399 and took more than a quarter of the European PC market.

Two things went wrong at the end of that decade. The PC2000 series of 1989 shipped with a faulty Seagate hard disk and had to be recalled and refitted, and although Amstrad later won its lawsuit against Seagate it never got the European lead back. Then the home computer market it had won stopped existing. Sugar was looking for a buyer by 1996, long negotiations with Psion over the Dancall mobile subsidiary collapsed on price, and in 1997 the company was wound up and its shares split into Viglen and Betacom. Betacom plc then renamed itself Amstrad plc, which is the legal reason the name survived another eleven years.

The CPC 464 launched into eight countries in 1984 and Turkey was not one of them. Neither was the second half of the company, because from 1989 onward the real business was building a receiver and a dish for one British broadcaster, which is work that cannot travel. Turkey's own satellite decade opened on 10 August 1994 when Türksat 1B went up from Kourou, and it opened as a state broadcasting platform rather than a subscription one, so the hardware underneath it came from somewhere else.

~ the record ~

~ how he made it cheap ~

The Amstrad method was to find the part of a product that cost money for no reason, remove it, then buy the rest from whoever would quote lowest. When Sky needed a satellite dish a household would agree to bolt onto a wall, Sugar went to a firm that pressed dustbin lids and asked it to press a mesh dish instead, which is how the price came down far enough for the platform to launch at all. The hi-fi separates of the 1970s worked on the same principle, sold on the specification sheet rather than on the sound.

~ the part that outlived the computers ~

Sky launched in February 1989 on the Astra 1A satellite and Amstrad was the only manufacturer producing both receivers and dishes at the price the launch needed. That relationship ran nineteen years, through analog and then digital, up to and including the Sky+ recorder. It spread beyond Britain too. Foxtel in Australia took Amstrad boxes from 1997 and Sky Italia from 2004, and in the parts of Germany without cable the black mesh minidish sold in large numbers after Astra 1B went up in May 1991.

By 2007 that single customer accounted for seventy five percent of Amstrad's set top box sales. BSkyB announced the takeover in July 2007 at £125 million, a 23.7 percent premium on the market capitalization, and the stated reason was that it wanted a hardware division of its own so it could design the next generation in-house and stop paying a margin to a supplier. Under Sky, Amstrad built receivers for Sky and for nobody else. In 2010 the satellite division was folded into Sky proper and the separate thing stopped existing.

~ the name came back without the company ~

Sugar stepped down as chairman on 2 July 2008, forty years after registering the business, and the shares were removed from the London Stock Exchange on 9 October 2008. Amstrad stopped trading at that point and carried on existing as an entry in a register. The Brentwood offices are a Premier Inn now.

Then in March 2024 the name came back. Sugar had been asking to buy it back since 2007 and had been refused every time, and he has been public about what he thought of the refusals; the sale went through after Comcast took over Sky in 2018. The buyer is Amstrad Digital, a performance marketing agency run by Sugar's grandson Joe Baron. The condition Sugar attached when he handed the name over was that he wanted to see some money out of it.

That revival is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing a liveness check trips over. A consumer electronics manufacturer that employed thousands of people, floated in 1980 and sat in the FTSE 100 was wound down in 2008, and a marketing agency bought the trademark sixteen years later. They share a word and a family, and the overlap ends there. What died in October 2008 was not recoverable by buying back the letters.

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