According to sources Bose or part of the business that holds voting shares is set to be sold.
Currently the majority owner of Bose Corporation is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Non-voting shares were donated to MIT by founder Amar Bose and receives cash dividends.
Back in 2021 Bose had sales of around US$3.2 billion but those sales are falling with insiders telling ChannelNews that the business could already be in discussions to sell the business with a an announcement tipped to be imminent claim industry executives.
The problem is that the industry is unsure how a business like Bose with it’s current structure and the involvement of MIT can be sold.
The company was founded in Massachusetts in 1964 by Amar Bose after he raised capital to fund his idea for a sound system.In the past Bose has a habit of acquiring or developing technologies and then selling them, however several industry executives claim that where Bose was once an innovators the Company today is more “a follower of audio trends” who trades off their past.
The bottom line is that Bose cannot be sold as a whole, however they can continue to subdivide, and self-cannibalise divisions due to the nature of the Companies structure and voting shareholding.Basically, the business is no longer a trend setter more a follower with their biggest strength being their brand name and past heritage.
Today Bose has very little to offer that is unique, they are also missing products that deliver a competitive advantage like they had in the past, with the demise of Sonos due to their horror app roll deliver a kick along for the Bose brand in the networked speaker market, particularly in the USA.
One observer who use to work for Bose recently wrote on Reddit “Bose used to be a major pioneer in noise cancelling technology however the attitude it had towards its competitors was always 3 years behind. When Sony really started to gain popularity, Bose pushed it under the rug and when Apple release noise cancelling AirPods and later Spatial Audio, only then did Bose recognise Sony as their major competitor – which was no longer the case, it was Apple”.
They Claimed In the years I worked for Bose, entire product lines were deleted and revised existing model lines lacked important differences between their predecessors and the competition”.
He cited as an example the introduction of the Lifestyle 650.
When released it appeared to be a step in the right direction despite removing support for DTS HD High Resolution Audio and DTS HD Master Audio – formats that its predecessor the Lifestyle 535 supported.
For a while, Bose offered Bluetooth Adapters with support for APTX, but subsequent models lacked this.
The original SoundLink Mini was a huge success but upon its rerelease as the SoundLink Mini II it was plagued with problems ranging from firmware to battery issues.
At one stage Bose was supporting at least 3 different music platforms including Bose SoundTouch and Bose Music, all incompatible with one another.
On August 15, 2019, Bose launched the Noise Cancelling 700 not as a successor to their QC35II but as a completely separate product line that in reality had no major functional difference to the QC35II. Bose AR was another failed product idea that could never gain traction because there was no market or existing need for it.
They also highlighted the fact that Dolby Atmos was never supported at any stage and when 4K was really starting to become in the forefront of people’s minds circa 2015, all new products released at the time had 4K support as a “pass through”.
ChannelNews understands that an announcement is due any day.
