Foxconn Buys Belkin, Linksys, and Wemo

rgMekanic

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Foxconn announced yesterday that it has purchased Belkin, and with it come Linksys, Wemo, and Phyn brands. TheVerge is reporting that Foxconn will pay $866 million in cash to acquire Belkin. The deal is likely subject to approval from the US Committee on Foreign Investment before going through, however Foxconn has pledged to build a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin.

Foxconn has definitely been showing their interest in branching out of just being a manufacturing partner, last month we covered them wanting to get into the digital cinema camera business, and now they have 3 major brands. Who knows, perhaps they will get into making enthusiast motherboards again. Thanks to Derangel for the story!
 
Foxconn has definitely been showing their interest in branching out of just being a manufacturing partner,

This could prove interesting. They've long been the OEM for a good majority of US companies, this allows them access to engineering documents that competitors would never have (outside of corporate espionage). If they go the route of competing with their partners, those partners are going to start looking elsewhere.
 
"C" is for consolidation. But it's OK. Because Wisconsin.

With Foxconn so heavy into iPhone gear this could be interesting going forward.

And wasn't it me who recommended the article? :)
 
The best thing Foxconn could do with Belkin and Linksys is to shut that crap down and NEVER sell anything having to do at all with ANY of their products that were made in the last 5-10 years.

Linksys went down the tubes years ago, and Belkin has pretty much always been for the most part overpriced trash.

The other 2 brands I have never heard of.
 
Linksys keeps getting passed around. Not as a fine wine, but more as drunken a "taste how bad this stuff is".
 
Pretty good value for Foxconn It’d only get them a couple of Belkin HDMI's and maybe a USB 3 cable at retail prices
 
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Will we be tracking suicides per router built now?

blood-ROUTER.jpg
 
Belkin owns Linksys when they bought them about 2, 3 years back. So it was a package deal. And Linksys has been crap since. No UI updates, no feature updates, and horrible performance for the price. They did a once a year update to the ROM for old products though.
 
Linksys keeps getting passed around. Not as a fine wine, but more as drunken a "taste how bad this stuff is".

Linksys was started by two guys from Cisco and they made awesome stuff. The WRT-54G was the Mac Daddy of the day. Now it's just crap
 
Linksys was started by two guys from Cisco and they made awesome stuff. The WRT-54G was the Mac Daddy of the day. Now it's just crap

I still don't understand how many people thing the WRT-54G was really that good. I went through multiple and they all started having issues after a few months where they would not stay connected and have to be rebooted on a regular basis to get wireless devices to be able to connect to them again.

Pieces of trash is what they were from my experience.
 
I still don't understand how many people thing the WRT-54G was really that good. I went through multiple and they all started having issues after a few months where they would not stay connected and have to be rebooted on a regular basis to get wireless devices to be able to connect to them again.

Pieces of trash is what they were from my experience.

Once you upgrade the firmware they were epic. Problems fixed 100% Mine still runs my SSID for phones. Currently 9 connected, 135 days uptime
 
Once you upgrade the firmware they were epic. Problems fixed 100% Mine still runs my SSID for phones. Currently 9 connected, 135 days uptime

Heh, you must have got one that actually worked then.

I tried Tomato and I think some other 3rd party firmware as well... no help whatsoever. The hardware itself was usually trash.

Oh.. and the range sucked as well.. even with the signal strength turned all the way up.
 
I had a friend in college that had probably a dozen of those wrt54gs hidden throughout his apartment complex repeating various neighbors wifi dumb enough to use wep.
 
Foxconn will pay $866 million in cash to acquire Belkin, however Foxconn has pledged to build a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin.

So they are paying less than $1 Billion for the entire company, yet are spending 10 times that on just a new factory?

The math seems suspect.
 
After what happened to Aaron Rodgers do we really want to see how far to the edge we push those cheese heads? I mean, come on Foxconn, couldn't you pick a less fragile state?
 
So they are paying less than $1 Billion for the entire company, yet are spending 10 times that on just a new factory?

The math seems suspect.

They're getting insane tax breaks for that factory. To the point where it will fuck over Wisconsin pretty hard when all is said and done.
 
I have a Belkin laptop cooling pad that I use with my desktop replacement laptop (without screen) .
It works good but is easily replaceable by another brand.
 
They're getting insane tax breaks for that factory. To the point where it will fuck over Wisconsin pretty hard when all is said and done.
Foxconn building a plant in the US has been a long time in the making. With Chinese labour laws tightening up they need to automate, but they know they can’t build an automated plant in China with out the tech being stolen by their competitors*. Apple has been promising for years to start building products in the US again and import costs on electronics are going up. The plant they are building in Wisconsin should have greater production and lower costs than their older ones in China and get them in good with the US Govt and it opens the door for Govt procurement of Apple products.

*Rio Tinto some 10 years back built one Aluminium smelter in China, the local contractors tried to engineer 3 identical plants machining their own parts along the way but ended up making mistakes along the way. They even went so far as to call in support from major engineering firms after the fact to the cloned sites trying to pass them off as the original. Supposedly the techs were on site for days trying to figure out how so many mistakes were introduced and missed by QC and it wasn’t until day 3 or 4 that they caught on to the fact the parts were all knock offs and they weren’t even on the correct work site.
 
*Rio Tinto some 10 years back built one Aluminium smelter in China, the local contractors tried to engineer 3 identical plants machining their own parts along the way but ended up making mistakes along the way. They even went so far as to call in support from major engineering firms after the fact to the cloned sites trying to pass them off as the original. Supposedly the techs were on site for days trying to figure out how so many mistakes were introduced and missed by QC and it wasn’t until day 3 or 4 that they caught on to the fact the parts were all knock offs and they weren’t even on the correct work site


and along that line of thought...

Foxconn buying up these companies could be a smoke screen for what they are really going to be doing. Making knock offs of their customers gear, routers, APs..etc, since they have complete access to all of it.. hardware/software .. but selling them as Belkin, linksys.. etc with minor tweaks/rebranding of the software
 
This is one of those deals that makes no sense to me. What do they get from this purchase? Companies who names are synonymous with shit, and what else?
 
This is one of those deals that makes no sense to me. What do they get from this purchase? Companies who names are synonymous with shit, and what else?

The best thing Foxconn could do with Belkin and Linksys is to shut that crap down and NEVER sell anything having to do at all with ANY of their products that were made in the last 5-10 years.

Linksys went down the tubes years ago, and Belkin has pretty much always been for the most part overpriced trash.

The other 2 brands I have never heard of.

TBH those of us who build computers have never seen Foxconn as anything but a cheap motherboard maker. No one ever wanted a Foxconn motherboard in a computer, they just ended up with one if they weren't willing to pay for something higher end. Foxconn doesn't make good products they make cheap products. So having them buy 2 more brands known for making mediocre products actually fits very well for them. They are looking to extract more profit and Belkin is a great company for that. They make a bunch of random items that nobody thinks about and more or less you typically only have one choice of if you go into a retail store. That makes for high profit margins.

 
The best thing Foxconn could do with Belkin and Linksys is to shut that crap down and NEVER sell anything having to do at all with ANY of their products that were made in the last 5-10 years.

Linksys went down the tubes years ago, and Belkin has pretty much always been for the most part overpriced trash.

The other 2 brands I have never heard of.
I like the Belkin 12 outlet surge protector.
 
Anybody else surprised that Belkin couldn't even muster a value of over a billion dollars?
 
and along that line of thought...

Foxconn buying up these companies could be a smoke screen for what they are really going to be doing. Making knock offs of their customers gear, routers, APs..etc, since they have complete access to all of it.. hardware/software .. but selling them as Belkin, linksys.. etc with minor tweaks/rebranding of the software
They are probably buying them for their IP so they can release a series of US manufactured routers and switches. Cisco is the only company that still makes them in the US almost everybody else has moved over seas and given Cisco’s financials I’m not sure for how long they will even manage that.
And let’s give Foxconn a little credit, they are generally the guys making the stuff everybody else is trying to knock off.
 
Maybe Linksys stops making crappy routers with even worse firmware. One can hope.
Ubiquity if you want good stuff

Cisco business stuff old and used is stable as hell.
Cisco 1812's is dirt cheap and cap out at 50-60 mbit vpn traffic, 100mbit interfaces but if you need upnp look elsewhere.
Modern good cisco stuff is just too pricey.
Asus routers is crap in my opinion regardless of model.

Myself runs an asus access point cause I couldnt't care less about wireless, my phone is on it...
Ubiquity p2p network to the garage half a mile away getting 200 mbit and really impressed.

As for routers, I've tried soo many and nothing gets close to what I can do with pfsense box, currently running a PHII quadcore and I manage to keep it in check with 300 mbit vpn traffic just barely.
Nothing I've ever touched get close to the Pfense if you can spare a downclocked desktop machine for it :)

Cisco and Ubiquity routers are good but it's too expensive, I ain't cashing out 10-15K $ for a router to be able to fulfill my needs (which may be a bit excessive)
 
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