Well this comes as surprise … aftermarket mainstay Greddy/Trust has just announced they are filing for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo District Court.
If you were to go by what you see in my neighborhood, these guys are making money hand over fist (in stickers affixed to the side of Hondas alone), but no, turns out that Greddy/Trust is in the red to the tune of $60 million and has $43 million in loans, and all of this since February of this year. Ouch!
All this is due, according to Greddy/Trust, to a sales drop off … dropped off a cliff from the looks of it. Greddy/Trust says there’s two parts to why their sales have cratered: One, there’s been a decrease in demand worldwide, and two (probably more importantly) there has been more and more knock-offs and cheaper bits & bobs made in China.
I could see the latter … purple anodized down-pipes are just fancy pieces of tubing, how hard can they be to copy?
Also, I’ve read elsewhere that the aftermarket as a whole in Japan is half of what it was a short time ago, and Greddy/Trust was just the first company show the signs of the downturn.
The world is bound to change, and what we’ve known as the “import tuner scene” for the past ten years or so will have to change with it. Things ebb and flow in the car world, usually prompted by fuel/environmental issues, and what seemed like a bankable constant (guys fiddling around with Japanese imports), turns out to be rather inconstant.
And so Greddy/Trust finds itself $60 million+ in the hole, and we might fins ourselves looking back on “The Fast & Furious III: Tokyo Drift” as being some sort of a high water mark.
Source: NextAutos
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