Pace plc

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

~ the eulogy ~

Pace made the object in your living room whose brand you never learned. If you had satellite television in Britain or cable in large parts of America, there was a reasonable chance that the thing sitting under the screen with the standby light on it had come out of a company in West Yorkshire that almost nobody outside the trade could name.

It started in 1982, founded by Barry Rubery, David Hood and Robert Fleming, trading as Pace Micro Supplies from 1983 and as Pace Micro Technology from 1987. The first business was modems, sold into the British home computer market when a modem was still a hobbyist purchase. In 1987 it began selling analogue satellite receivers, which became the whole company. The modem arm was eventually sold off in a management buy-out called PMC Electronics, which went into receivership in August 1999.

None of its modems ever reached my desk. The ones that got to Turkey came through whatever the importers were carrying that season, generic internal cards and the occasional US Robotics for people with money, and the name on the box was not something anyone chose. Pace sold into British high street retail, and that distribution simply did not reach this far.

~ the dossier ~

~ out of the mill ~

The head office was part of Salt's Mill in Saltaire, the nineteenth-century mill outside Bradford that Titus Salt built and that stopped making cloth in the 1980s. A company shipping digital television hardware across three continents ran out of a corner of it. In 2001 the manufacturing was outsourced and the site was reduced to an administration and development center.

In 1996 Pace introduced the world's first DVB decoders, built for the Australian satellite operator Galaxy, and floated on the London Stock Exchange the same year. It started shipping digital satellite equipment to BSkyB in 1998. In January 1999 it bought the set-top box division of Acorn Computers, so engineers from the company that made the BBC Micro ended up building television receivers in Yorkshire.

~ the hundred millionth box ~

Comcast deliveries started in June 2000. In March 2002 Pace was first to market with a free-to-view personal video recorder, and in February 2005 it shipped the first DVB-C recorder with Foxtel in Australia. In April 2008 it bought the set-top box and connectivity division of Philips, roughly doubling the size of the company, and in July 2010 it took 2Wire, the American home networking firm. Aurora Networks followed in January 2014.

In 2012 Pace sold its one hundred millionth digital set-top box. Revenue in 2014 was $2,620.0 million, with net income of $148.0 million.

~ incorporated here, run there ~

On 22 April 2015 the boards of Pace and Arris Group announced a recommended combination, stock and cash, valuing Pace at 1.4 billion pounds. The structure is the interesting part: the combined group was incorporated in the United Kingdom and operationally managed from the United States, with Pace shareholders holding 24 percent of it and Arris shareholders 76. The British company supplied the domicile and the American one supplied everything else.

The last regulatory clearance arrived in December 2015 and the listing ended with it. The deal completed on 4 January 2016. Three years and three months later, on 4 April 2019, CommScope completed its own acquisition of Arris, and the Saltaire business passed to a second American owner in three years. Neither pace.com nor pace.co.uk resolves today.

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