Jerrold

"Jerrold faced serious issues—chief among them was inflated numbers tied to a corrupt purchasing department taking kickbacks. Productivity at the main factory was also poor. We overhauled purchasing, shut down the Philadelphia plant, and moved operations to more efficient locations in Nogales, Mexico; Springfield, Massachusetts for high-end parts; and Asia for low-cost components. By committing to large-volume buys, we cut costs dramatically."

"GI was one of the first companies to market with UHF tuners, introduced in the 1950s and ’60s to allow TVs to receive ultra high frequency (UHF) channels (13 through 48) beyond the original very high frequency (VHF) band (channels 1 through 13). GI had stock that was overvalued at the time, and the company wanted to use it to buy something. Jerrold, it was discovered later, had some financial irregularities, always to the upside, of course, since accounting “errors” rarely make a firm’s finances look worse rather than better. So GI had used inflated paper to buy an inflated business. Less than a year after the Jerrold acquisition, GI was in trouble. It had bought a series of businesses, which wasn’t working, and, worse, now General Instrument was struggling to stay current on its loan payments."