We are told ...
Founded in 1991 when the Tannoy Goodmans Industries Plc. group decided to make the OEM part of their business a separate entity and to withdraw the use of the Goodmans trademark from the consumer sector (which also resulted in the consumer trademark rights being sold or licensed to Alba). The GLL company was based in Havant in Hampshire, UK and initially made a fairly generic range of loudspeaker drivers with focus on supplying the then burgeoning TV market (the UK was for a time in the 80's and 90's one of the largest manufacturer of TV's in the world due to a number of Asian companies that opened up assembly lines there in order to gain a manufacturing base inside the EU) but during the 90's increasingly focused on the lucrative automotive loudspeaker sector and in the latter half of the 90's the company was one of the main supplier of drivers to General Motors Europe, Volkswagen, PSA (Peugeot & Citroen), BMW and Honda, the drivers from the company being ideally suited for this purpose being made almost entirely out of synthetic materials. In order to refocus on the auto market and gain a lower cost manufacturing base the company leased the manufacturing plants of Videoton in Hungary in 1999 and formed a strategic alliance with the Malaysian company Foremost Audio the year after and in order to be able to supply the South American sector they formed an alliance with the Brazilian company Thomas KL which was prior to that primarily a supplier of after-market solutions, they had also increased the portion of bought in Asian parts from companies such as Sound Source to drive costs down.
GLL had been quite profitable during the 1990's unlike some other parts of the TGI group but in 2001 the competition from cheap Chinese imports suddenly and quite dramatically turned the fortunes of the company around and it posted it's first yearly loss, TGI was acquired by the Danish company TC Group in 2002 and they decided to actually take the company forward in a similar fashion to the rest of the group with emphasis on using high tech solutions and image, plans were indeed made for OEM DSP based amplifier solutions partly based on technology from the TC Group which would have been the company's first foray into the auto electronics market. There was also a notable image change with a new logo that emphasised that the company was by now a primarily a car audio manufacturer and the reintroduction of the Goodmans name but the company had been using the GLL brand prior to that with it's logo that depicted a home hi-fi loudspeaker. In 2002 GLL also opened a new manufacturing plant in Monterrey in Mexico and a technical centre in Detroit, Michigan, USA with a view to supplying the North American car manufacturers (although I gather that in the end the Mexican plant only supplied VW Mexico). The new strategy was to a degree a success with the company becoming the favoured supplier to a number of car manufacturers that recognised their products as technically superior and in addition to their traditional European customers the company had major design wins in the USA, but it was also a double edged sword since GLL had to match or at the least be fairly close in price to their competitors and at this time the market was bombarded with cheap Chinese speakers, so GLL in effect had to supply a technically more advanced and more expensive solution on the same price resulting in further and growing losses, additionally it had been costly to move manufacturing outside of the UK, more so than originally thought and with less benefits than expected and to add insult to injury it also proved more expensive to shut down production in the UK than was expected, just the employee termination liabilities would come to more than 1,4 million £. As the prospects for the company going into the black in the near future being bleak the TC Group decided to exit the car audio market altogether and to sell GLL, attempts to sell it as a going concern failed so it went into administration on the 10th of March 2004.
