Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum New Owner of Steinway, John Paulson

Very cool!

Reassuring.

[And I still can't believe they sold Steinway Hall!]

Thanks for posting this.

my kind of guy!...

I feel so much better now.

That's pretty cool. His father could not afford to buy a Steinway, and now he will purchase the entire company. It seems like it could be the fulfillment (for a short time anyway) of a lifelong dream of John's.

He does seem to respect the Steinway piano. I salute him for this.

I wish him well and hope that his stewardship will be truly successful.

I wonder if his sisters are going to finally get a Steinway.

He does seem to care about the company. My dad works with a lot of these financial types, and a lot of them are just slimy people out to make a few easy millions in whatever market has potential (ahem-the whole real-estate/tech bubble back in the 2000s). However, there are the rare types who do know what they're doing and strive to do something other than make as much money possible. He seems like one of the latter. I definitely respect him now, and hope he'll take Steinway to a better position in the market. I wholeheartedly wish him the best of luck!

I honestly can't see why his sisters would have cried about the baby grand. I'd be crying tears of joy if my dad went out and replaced my upright with a grand, regardless of the brand (although I'd probably blast through the roof if it was a Steinway). Guess it must've been a real stinker of a baby grand :P

Comes across as very genuine and down to earth.

I believe him. Seems like maybe he bought it in defense of what Samick and Kohler were going to do to it. Maybe outsource manufacturing to Pearl River, slap on a Steinway sticker, charge $15K for a B.

This is initially reassuring.

But then, every customer and technician and piano teacher I speak with has brought up the question of what I think is going to happen to the company. The sale is common knowlegde. It is something that everyone has interest in and is nervous about. I have always answered that we have to wait and see.

I still feel that way. This video is a good start, for certain, but as Henrik Ibsen said, "A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed."

Fingers crossed!

This video was beautifully made to reassure us. I hope everything said is genuine.

Did anyone find it ironic or sad that the shots of Mr. Paulson were done at Steinway Hall, which Steinway has already sold and are planning to move out of?

I'd like him to buy that back.

How could anyone possibly know the reasoning of Samick or Kohler?

Interesting. Seems genuine, which is good news. Pity he is still peddling the ludicrous investment myth, but still his reassurance about preserving the brand and manufacturing etc sounds sincere.

Steinway Hall strikes me as irrelevant: just a building. No one plays buildings. Pianos can be displayed in any modern facility, probably better.

Adrian

Adrian,

Out of curiosity, have you been to Steinway Hall in NY? Indeed, any modern facility can display pianos, but the domed recital space in the front of the building was a marquee performance spot. Transferring a bunch of pianos to a new facility, even if it gleams modernity, may lose some of the brand value. And brand value is real value. Of course, Steinway may have accurately counted the lost brand value -- if any -- into the sale decision. But if they're wrong, it wouldn't be the first time that an American company shortchanged the future in the name of the present.

Of course, we, the great unwashed living in the boonies, make a piano selection based on the architecture of an irrelevant and unseen sales edifice. Brand value?

Well, take a bath, man!

Why do you generalize from your particular situation to the company's more general issues?

The fact that the glories of Steinway Hall didn't help you personally to sell Steinways to Lutheran bachelor farmers in the boonies of frozen Minnesota doesn't mean that the Hall itself contributed nothing to the brand value for LVB. And the NY area is a pretty big market.

I'm not claiming that selling Steinway Hall was a colossal mistake, though some other posters have. I don't have enough information to make that case. All I'm suggesting is that it is possible the sale was shortsighted.

You may well be right, possibly due to property value rather than brand value. What price heritage value?

When it comes to brand value, Mr Paulson needs to pay attention to this sort of thing: