Lloyd's Electronics

~ the last words ~

This brand finished its working life in the year I turned four, in a retail market I have never shopped in, and the reason it earns a page here is structural rather than sentimental. Lloyd's Electronics is what a consumer electronics company looks like when it owns no factories. It was founded in Los Angeles on 11 May 1959 as the Lloyd Trade Company by Abraham Zagha and Alvin Tanenbaum, and the business was buying transistor radios and tape recorders in Japan and Taiwan and selling them in the United States under its own name.

The model held for a long time. Within a few years the firm was one of the largest importers of consumer electronics in the country, and the decade after that is mostly a list of buildings. The head office went to New York City by 1966, and the company put up new warehouses at Saddle Brook and then Teterboro in New Jersey. In 1972 it moved head office again, to Compton in California, and filed its initial public offering on the American Stock Exchange. The same year it launched a line of desktop and pocket calculators carrying some of the earliest liquid crystal displays anyone had fitted to one. North American Rockwell supplied the displays and the chips. Final assembly stayed in Japan and Taiwan.

There was one attempt at making things. A plant opened in Toronto in 1973 and production was back in East Asia inside a few months. Later that year the board pushed Tanenbaum out as chairman and he persuaded a New York judge to block his removal. The other directors came back with a restraining order, and the courts settled it by ordering the company to keep him on for two more months. He left in early 1974 to buy a rival, the York Radio Company, which became Yorx. Zagha took the chair.

~ the record ~

~ the brand without a factory ~

The trouble with owning only a name is that the name has to stay worth something. From 1979 Lloyd's lost money four years running. It got back to profit in 1983 by changing lenders and cutting costs, and then sold itself. Bacardi, of all possible buyers, announced late that year that it would pay about twelve million dollars, six dollars a share, for an American consumer electronics company. It had already bought Willmark Electronics in Puerto Rico, which was one of Lloyd's own suppliers. Walter Cruickshank, the company secretary and treasurer, explained the appeal without decorating it: "Bacardi is an extremely wealthy company. They've got cash and that could help us."

Cash was not the missing ingredient. Bacardi closed the deal in January 1984, wrote off eight million dollars of unsold inventory, and by February 1986 was looking for the exit. Texas Hitech of Oklahoma City paid roughly twenty million dollars that September and renamed the combined business THT Lloyd's. It had lost 5.5 million dollars across two quarters by late 1987 and sold off the television and video recorder lines. In early 1988 the Metrosound car stereo division went to a pair of private investors.

~ the badge outlives the company ~

Dynascan Corporation of Chicago announced in January 1988 that it was buying the trademark and the assets for just under three million dollars, and the purchase completed in May. Jerry Kalov, Dynascan's chief executive, had cut in ahead of a letter of intent from Hagemeyer of the Netherlands. The structure is the giveaway: a minority stakeholder called Peers & Company kept the liabilities, including lawsuits left over from the sale to Texas Hitech, and Dynascan took the name. Analysts read the move as roughly doubling Dynascan's projected annual sales to around two hundred and fifty million dollars.

Dynascan already owned Marantz and ran it as the serious hi-fi brand, so Lloyd's was positioned underneath as the cheap one, with its Hong Kong office repurposed as a sourcing hub for the other divisions. It did not take. In fiscal 1988 Lloyd's lost nearly 1.5 million dollars on three million dollars of sales, a figure the trade press called paltry. Dynascan became Cobra Electronics and let the trademark lapse in 2004, sixteen years after paying for it. The domain belongs today to a two-way radio dealer trading across West Virginia and Ohio, an unrelated namesake. A company that never owned a factory ended as a trademark nobody renewed.

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