International. A bankruptcy court recently approved the sale of Arecont Vision to Costar, an American corporation that designs, develops, manufactures and distributes a wide range of video surveillance and computer vision products.
Following the closing of the sale, Arecont Vision began operations as Arecont Vision Costar LLC, and joined the existing Costar family of brands: CohuHD Costar, Costar Video Systems, Innotech and IVS Imaging.
In May, Arecont Vision announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as part of an effort to restructure its debt and clean up its balance sheet in order to compete in what has become a new era for the security industry. Instead of bringing together the best solutions from different vendors, today's end users are increasingly looking for a one-stop shop from their integrator and manufacturing partners, which means the days of making a single component of the video ecosystem, such as Arecont. Vision had done so in the past with megapixel cameras, which are slowly coming to an end.
Recognizing this change, Arecont at ISC West launched in April its most comprehensive Contera solutions, including megapixel cameras (Arecont Vision Mega and Contera IP), video management system software (ConteraVMS), video recorders and NVRs (ConteraCMR), and cloud-based web management services (ConteraWS).
According to Raul Calderon, president of Arecont Vision Costar, conducting the Chapter 11 process was a great help in allowing the company to abandon its initial burden and now the company can devote itself entirely to recapitalizing the business to address the changing market. and its product portfolio.
"Removing this large financial burden now allows a significant portion of our profits to be reinvested in the business, rather than paying off previous debt," Calderon says. "This will ensure that we can focus on delivering superior products to the market."
From Costar's perspective, James Pritchett, the company's CEO and president, says Arecont's products are a great addition to its current offerings, and Arecont fits with Costar's strategy of acquiring firms that design and manufacture their own surveillance products.
"Together with our recent acquisitions, the addition of Arecont transforms our value-added OEM business to one that 75% of our revenue comes from products designed and manufactured," explains Pritchett. "Another attractive aspect of the acquisition was that even though Costar companies currently sell in the retail and financial markets, there was very little customer overlap, so the acquisition significantly expands our overall customer base."
Being recapitalized as a result of the acquisition, Calderon says Arecont now has a renewed commitment to reinvest in key research and development, as well as sales and support activities. In addition, customers can expect to see the benefits derived from the potential synergies between Arecont Vision Costar, CohuHD Costar and other affiliated companies.
