MUSIKMESSE 2012: Fender upgrades American Standard line
Fender has just bumped up the quality of its already awesome American Standard series, with new features including Fender Custom Shop pickups, aged plastic parts and even a new player-friendly comfort carve on the back of the American Standard Telecaster. Check out the new American Standard Stratocaster with Custom Shop Fat 50′s single coils in the pic above. Nice. Check out the American Standard guitars here and basses here.
Andertons are offering killer deals on outgoing pre-2012 American Standards, if you’d like to pick up a bargain!
Fender seeks $200m in IPO
Now this takes me back to my last ‘day job,’ which was finance journalist (believe it or not).
Fender Musical Instruments Corp is looking to raise $200 million via an initial public stock offering. (Go here for the full S-1 form). The company plans to use half of the funds to help pay down $246.2 million in debt, and may also use some of the proceeds to acquire other businesses, products or technologies, although no agreements or commitments for any specific acquisitions exist at this time. MSN has a great article about what this means for Fender, who is also leveraging its brand identity via more aggressive licensing including co-branding deals with Apple and Hard Rock Cafe International, concluding, “So in light of its global brands — as well as growth opportunities — Fender should continue to be a top-notch player in the music business. Expect investors to line up for the IPO when it hits the market within a couple of months.”
For the year to January 2, 2012, Fender’s net sales increased 13% to $700.6 million, up from $617.8 million a year earlier and $612.5 million the year before that. Operating income dropped from $29.8 million to $12 million between January 3, 2010 and January 2, 2011, but jumped to $41.8 million for the most recent year. The company reported a $17.2 million loss for the year to January 2, 2011 but achieved a net profit of $3.2 million for its most recent financial year. Adjusted EBITDA was $43.7 million for fiscal 2009, $22.8 million for 2010 and $52.9 million for 2011.
It’s interesting to note that in the second quarter of fiscal 2010, Fender’s main paint supplier shut down due to financial difficulty, forcing a halt to production at Corona, California for four months, with full production not resuming for a further three months. This led to a production backlog which ultimately resulted in significantly lower net sales and incomes from operations in fiscal 2010, but higher sales in the first and second quarters of fiscal 2011 as the company filled the backlog. Fender has since increased focus on developing second sources of supply where feasible.
Another particularly interesting item in the S-1 filing is that in fiscal 2012 the company plans to create a specialty sales force in North America to focus on selling non-Fender branded instruments and accessories. Personally I’d love to see some of this extra muscle applied to promoting the Hamer brand, which I see as being able to fill a niche that isn’t quite being picked up by the Fender, Jackson or Charvel brands. The company continues to invest in its Corona (California) and Ensenada (Mexico) facilities to drive higher overall gross margins going forward, and I think the Vistior Center at the Corona facility is a great example of this, from an outreach/public relations perspective at the very least.
Fender has not yet announced exactly how many shares it plans to offer in the IPO, nor the offer date.
The very first Fiesta Red Fender ever
Recently while at the Fender factory and Visitor Center in Corona, California I stumbled upon this little beauty: the very first Fiesta Red Fender guitar ever. It’s a 1957 Jazzmaster prototype, and not only was this the first Fiesta Red guitar, this very guitar was also the first ever Fender to feature a custom colour. And if that doesn’t make it historic enough, Fender’s George Fullerton later added an experimental neck with a round-laminated fretboard made of lacquer-coated black vulcanised fiber – the same stuff used to make pickup bobbins.
Here’s some more info on the guitar from Fender.
We get so used to thinking of guitars as these commodities, mass-produced items that you can see half a dozen of lined up at your local store. But stuff like this particular Jazzmaster, and like visiting the Fender factory in general, reminds me that each one is a unique instrument with tonal properties particular to the individual pieces of wood, the individual trees, that they were made from. And then when you think that before this instrument was made there was no such thing as a Fiesta Red Fender, and that this is the actual first one to ever feature this finish – it all just makes it hit home that little bit harder, the history of this wonderful instrument that we all (if you’re reading this site) use to express ourselves.
The Fender American Design Experience
I love my Fender American Vintage ’62 Stratocaster Reissue. And I’ve been blown away by pretty much every single Fender Custom Shop instrument I’ve had the pleasure to play. But you may not know that Fender offers a unique experience which falls somewhere in between these two instrument lines. The Fender American Design Experience is a service offered at the Fender Visitor Center at the factory in Corona, California, where visitors can select the individual components to make up their very own custom guitar.
Fender has dozens of bodies, necks and pickguard configurations on display in the American Design Experience room, and the helpful staff will talk you through the various options and their respective qualities: neck shape, fret size, wood type, pickups, switching configurations, etc. There are plenty of bodies on display, and Fender’s paint shop even provides unique one-off finishes that will never be seen on a production line Fender guitar. The guitar is then assembled at Fender, and delivered to its new owner in less than a month, complete with certificate of authenticity.
I snapped the pics below when I visited the factory in January. If I’ve done this right (it’s a new plugin I haven’t used before) there should be an automatic slideshow of pics from the Fender American Design Experience, but you can also click on the option to see the picture list if you’d like to do things that way, where you’ll also get to see some captions (just click on the picture to exit this mode). Enjoy!
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), guitarworld.com, Tone Deaf, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Reverbnation or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com