Newell Brands, the owner of Pure Fishing, has announced their plans to sell Pure Fishing and Jostens. This is part of what they call an “Accelerate Transformation Plan”. According to their press release, they will be divesting non-core businesses representing approximately 35 percent of the company’s net sales.
The company states that the divestiture process is well underway and expects to complete all transactions by the end of 2019.
On a conference call, Newell Brands’ CEO Michael Polk offered an explanation for the potential sale of Pure Fishing and Jostens.
“While both of those businesses are really interesting businesses, in some ways neither benefits as much as the ones we’ve chosen to keep from the capabilities we’ve invested to create in innovation and design and in e-commerce,” Polk said. “While Fishing has a bit of an international footpring in the Nordic and parts of Europe, it is less of a big global opportunity than some of our other businesses, and certainly Jostens is geographically constrained.”
Two years ago, Newell Brands purchased Jarden Corp., who owned Pure Fishing at the time. Since the $15 billion deal was closed, Newell Brands has repeatedly missed sales goals and lost billions of dollars of market value, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Pure Fishing is the parent company of Abu Garcia, Berkley, Fenwick, Hardy, Hodgman, Johnson, Mitchell, Penn, Pflueger, Sebile, Shakespeare, Spiderwire, Stren and Ugly Stik.
