I hope this is enough to help them pull out of the funk from the last several years. I lot of missteps and bad coincidences, and major moves and tooling changes added up to fail. They had a sterling reputation among the hunters and precision shooters, but flushed that away. There floundering gave others like Ruger, Savage, and foreign firms like Tikka/Sako and CZ a chance to grab market share.
Hopefully they can get back to be a premier hunting rifle company, a premier mfger of precision rifles, and for goodness sakes pull the ammo line out of the 1990s. While CoreLokt is a trusted basic hunting load, they totally missed the boat on bonded bullets for defense and hunting (minor try with CoreLokt Ultra but weak marketing), and do they even make target grade bullets and/or ammo? Meanwhile Winchester, Hornady, and Federal are eating up the market and even new players such as Sig are doing much better at it than Remington/UMC.
Remington needs to clear the decks and push hard into areas they historically dominated. Win back a major spot in hunting and precision target shooting, and meanwhile figure out if they can win some new territory in rimfire and defensive markets, especially rifles. Not sure they should even try any handguns but rifles in those markets they need to get a solid foothold. If I was CEO for a day:
1) Cancel all Thunder Turd and Golden Bullet production and figure out how to make QUALITY rimfire ammo like CCI, Aguila, and Federal at least, and quit selling junk. Maybe even learn how to make European level target ammo like Eley, RWS, Lapua/SK. Maybe start by rebranding some of it just to establish name association with quality rimfire. Even about the cheapest ammo out there, Blazer, is ten times better than ANYTHING from Remington.
2) Look at Tikka, CZ, Savage, and Ruger and figure out how they are being so innovative, keeping costs down, and still producing accurate and reliable guns that the public wants to buy. Ruger had main rifle platform the M77. When it became too expensive for the working man crowd they came out with the Ruger American, which was not a cheapened M77 but a new design that was cheaper yet still decent quality a shooter/hunter could still enjoy. Figure out how Tikka and Browning make such excellent smooth bolts and light, crisp triggers.
3) S&W broke into the rimfire plinker market out of the blue in a big way with the M&P 15-22. The Ruger 10/22 is well over 50 years old and still a dominate market seller. Even Marlin does good business with a very old design, but reliable and accurate plinker in the Model 60. Remington should be able to come up with an even better "tinker toy" modular rimfire semi-auto. And then they should figure out how to at least compete with Tikka and CZ at the moderate cost target rifle segment, and really should try to have a precision line for Olympic style competitions.
4) Partner with bullet companies like Nosler, and Sierra or Berger, and Barnes and develop premium centerfire lines for hunting, target and self-defense. Also need to develop a reliable bonded pistol bullet. Speer really nailed it with the Gold Dot (inexpensive to make, reliable performance, and accurate), but has dropped the ball in getting any noticeable quantities of GD bullets out as components for reloaders. right now Federal and Winchester pretty much own the police market, but Remington/UMC should be able to break into it, especially for LE sniper rifle ammo.
