Peter James over at Ask JackRabbit has a report on some General Motors-style consolidation taking place amongst the many marine electronics brands now owned by Navico.

Sorry, who?

“If you haven’t heard of Navico, it’s the company that now owns these brands: Eagle, Lowrance, Simrad, B&G, Northstar and Navman. Plus MX Marine which makes equipment for the commercial market.”

Oh, those guys! Them I’ve heard of.

Turns out they’re planning to aggregate manufacturing for all these brands in three locations: Mexico, New Zealand, and Norway. If I were running the company, I’d probably do the same thing.

“Though the brands will remain distinct, and be targeted at different market segments, the parts used within the various devices made under those brands will be shared to gain economies of scale.”

That sounds right. Good for Navico!

But here’s where it gets interesting:

Navico is becoming the GM of the marine electronics world. Where GM sells an almost identical SUV branded as either a Saab or a Chevrolet, now Navico will be selling items such as a Lowrance fishfinder and a Simrad fishfinder with different software features and price points, but essentially the same hardware under the hood.

The question still to be answered is: how many Saab customers will buy an SUV that they know is really a Chevy Trailblazer? GM, I assume, hopes they don’t know. Is Navico also counting on an uninformed consumer to maintain the price points on B&G and Simrad?

Anyway, you can read the whole article here.