History (1991): German Boeder Buys Back RPS French FD Business

French diskettes no longer exist.

There still was a tape and especially diskette manufacturer, named RPS or Rhône-Poulenc Systemes (Noisy-le-Grand), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Rhône-Poulenc. But the French nationalized chemical group has just sold it all to a German company, Boeder AG (Flöesheim am Main, Germany).

It’s no big surprise. Two years ago, RPS was already for sale. In those days, Jean-Claude Reverchon, its manager and chairman said: “It would better for Rhône-Poulenc and especially for RPS to have a shareholder with the same assets as Rhône-Poulenc and with the firm idea to stay in this business for a long time.“

The aim is only half reached. Boeder is a family-owned business, 50-years old. Its sales amounted to approximately DM108 million in 1990, less than RPS’ FF435 million.

The multinational chemical company had tried to enter data processing business, simply dreaming of a fruitful diversification. Now that Rhône-Poulenc sold Regma, and afterwards its French Albi and Nangis computer media manufacturing plants, it has totally withdrawn.

Its last data processing subsidiary had finally reached a financial balance last year without counting the heavy financial expenses it had to support.

“This European grouping satisfied Rhône-Poulenc that wanted this activity to last, and our customers had a very positive reaction, “says RPS’s president Jean-Claude Reverchon. “The two companies are also very complementary on a geographic and customer level. We are closer to OEMs and Southern Europe, Boeder to large public and Northern Europe. And except for diskettes, our other products, like paper for them and magnetic tapes for us, are very different.”

“The price and settlement of the acquisition won ‘t be given before the final signature of the contract and that will take 4 or 5 more weeks,” explains Boeder. “We don’t plan any changes for RPS. We will keep on manufacturing in France and will keep all the staff.“

The WW diskette business is being completely changed. Except for 3M, all the other Americans are giving up.

Hanny Magnetics (Hong Kong) acquired Xidex/Dysan, Mitsubishi has bought Verbatim from Kodak.

Is there still a chance left in Europe? It looks doubtful. Except the German company BASF, there are only a half dozen small manufacturers left in EC market like Atlantic Magnetics and Euromagnetics in Great Britain, Sentinel in Belgium, or Computer Support Italy and Balteadisk (subsidiary of Olivetti) in Italy that don’t weigh very much.

But there is now the new Boeder/RPS couple that maybe has a few chances if you listen to Jean-Claude Reverchon: “We own the largest European production capacity per year with 100 million diskettes, at least 20% of it all, and we sell 15% of what is bought in Europe.”

Boeder’s success will probably depend on the ability of the German company to outgrow a small family size to reach a more significant one that would allow it to compete with floppy disk giant companies like Fuji, Kao, Hitachi Maxell, JVC, Mitsubishi, 3M , Sony or TDK.

This means that Boeder will have to have to find finances to invest in production, but also in R&D so it won’t be left behind the day the new gen of high capacity diskettes comes along.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠36, published on January 1991.