Glock's Secret Path to Profits

[TPaine7]

Gaston Glock, an Austrian manufacturer of shovels and knives, had an improbable dream: He would make a fortune selling handguns in America. In the early 1980s, Glock, a self-taught firearm designer, produced an innovative pistol for the Austrian military. He then devised a plan for promoting his invention in the U.S., the world's richest gun market. First, he'd persuade American police they needed a lightweight weapon with more ammunition than traditional revolvers. Then he'd use his law enforcement bona fides to win over private gun buyers.

…

Today the company claims 65% of the American law-enforcement market, an amazing accomplishment for a privately held manufacturer based in tiny Ferlach in southern Austria. U.S. fans celebrate "Glockmas," the 80-year-old founder's July 19 birthday. U.S. sales soared 71% in the first quarter of its 2010 fiscal year, largely due to what gun executives call the "Obama stimulus": fear among gun owners that the liberal President plans to curb the marketing of handguns. Gaston Glock played on that anxiety in an open letter to customers in January. "As shooters and gun owners, we must band together with even greater zeal than in the past," he wrote. "We are not going to roll over and have our guns taken away because of some of our misguided neighbors, no matter who they are."

Behind the Glock phenomenon, however, is another story, one rife with intrigue and allegations of wrongdoing. The company's hidden history raises questions about its taxpayer-financed law-and-order franchise. Is this a company that deserves the patronage of America's police? Does Glock merit the lucrative loyalty of private American gun buyers? The Glock tale also underscores the difficulty U.S. regulators have overseeing complex international businesses.

…

Over time, Ewert transferred ownership of some of the Glock-affiliated shells to himself, according to Luxembourg court judgments. Suspicious of Ewert, Gaston Glock sought an explanation in July 1999. On the afternoon of a meeting scheduled at Ewert's office near the tony Rue Royale in central Luxembourg, Glock was attacked in an underground garage. The hit man, a former professional wrestler and French Legionnaire named Jacques Pecheur, bashed the businessman on the head with a rubber mallet, a technique apparently aimed at making it look like the victim had fallen down and fatally injured himself. Glock, physically fit from daily swimming—often in the frigid lake abutting his home near Klagenfurt, Austria—fought back. When police arrived, they found Glock bleeding from gashes to his skull. Pecheur, 67, was unconscious.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_38/b4147036107809.htm

Beyond the attempted hit, there are claims of skimming, tax evasion, admiration of Nazis, and illegal contributions to right wingers—including our former President.

There’s a lot of smoke here, and at least some fire. These are exactly the types of allegations made by many who oppose gun rights—at least the right wing support, Nazi support, and political corruption. I would note, however, that this is not an American company but a company that has bested a US company—Smith and Wesson—in the marketplace.

The truth or falsity of these allegations actually does matter to me. I would like to know what you think.

[safeinOhio]

1. Hard to compete with

industry in Europe. Health care and strong unions. Even so all GLOCK pistols are still manufactured in Austria, the new GLOCK facility at Smyrna now assembles and test fires all pistols imported to the United States.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

2. Not much. I like how easy it is to take down and re-assemble

the Glock. Good design but I think they are ugly so I really don't care about the company. I do, however, not doubt for one second that this whole "They're gonna take our guns away!" bullshit has been, at least partly promoted by the gun manufacturers to spur sales. I sure hope all the goobers reach a point where they just can't afford to buy anymore though cause the ammo shortage is really cutting into my range time.

[spin]

3. Glocks are ugly but reliable...

I don't own one and probably never will, but I've fired a bunch and they function so well that I have been very impressed. I still like the god old Colt .45.

[TheWraith]

5. If I were going to get a pistol, it would be a 1911.

I don't much like the Glock design: many of them don't have proper trigger safeties, and they lack the traditional hammer. If I were going for European small arms, I'd pick FN Herstal any day of the week.

[Pavulon]

7. I have one with 25,000 rounds on it.

3.5 lb connector. The trigger does not break like a 1911, but it does hold 18+1 and has never failed to fire over a 17 year time frame. Only problems (3) were limp wristed shots by the operator.

Speaking of 1911's Wilson combat, one of the best. Stuffing bills under the mattress for this one.

[X_Digger]

6. Love my 1911 for plinking..

.. but it's a bit large for carry. I like my springfield sub compact, though, for carry. I tried out many of the smaller striker fired guns, and the springfield was the most comfortable yet concealable.

[spin]

4. K&R (n/t)

[paulsby]

8. as a police firearms instructor, they are the BEST

glocks are clearly the best firearms choice available for AGENCY employment.

that was especially true at the time glocks first came out.

i've seen hundreds of thousands of rounds fired through glocks on our range. they are incredibly reliable, and the tests they passed to get adopted by the austrian military were incredible (submerged in mud, frozen in ice, dropped from high distance, etc.)

iow, whatever one can say about the COMPANY, i want cops to have the best gun available to them (both as individuals and as a collective force).

they are extremely easy to replace parts on, they have FAR FAR less moving parts than the average auto, they can be broken down with ONE tool, etc. it just goes on and on.

they are easier to lubricate, less prone to rust...

their magazines are interchangeable between compacts and full size, etc.

as a matter of personal aesthetics, balance, etc. they are not MY favorite gun for PERSONAL use, but that is an ENTIRELY different metric than for an agency adoption of a firearm

[57_TomCat]

12. I too am a Police Firearms instructor...

and the Glock is by far the simplest handgun to get recruits up to speed on. We use a selection of Glock 17's and 19's at the regional basic police academy. Unfortunately it is also an easy gun to accidentally discharge if your training is sub par or you fail to maintain attention to detail. I currently use the Glock as my personal off duty choice. They (the full time employer) issue me a SIG 229 and I would MUCH prefer the Glock for duty use as well. I do get to carry my Glock for the part time job at least.

I purchased a selection of S&W M&P's to possibly replace my personal Glock collection. Wanted to support an American company. As good as the S&W is it did not quite meet my needs for simplicity and ease of use. It was a "little" larger and a "little" more complicated. The M&P however is the closest thing to a Glock killer there is in the U.S. and it is beginning to take away some market share.

As for the Glock's Secret path to profits...well they put together a superior product and marketed it aggressively by using price point as the bait. Often making a profit on the guns they swapped even for by selling the PD trade ins they generated. I am a Glock fan but not up to speed on this Glock mania. I have never celebrated "GlockMas". The article looks to be a great case of smoke and mirrors. Three major players have been busted for private gain and they are trying to "share the wealth" in an attempt to provide cover for their transgressions. Looks to me to be a case of embezzlement as opposed to a case of company wrongdoing.

The article did fail to mention the national matches that Glock sponsors by way of their Glock Sport Shooting Foundation. These matches are held annually coast to coast with over 20+ venues and they are tailored to citizens of all skill levels with a prize table that is piled high with money and free guns to the various winners. I have been participating for over 10 years and won a total of three pistols over those years. This type of marketing is a plus for the LE and especially the citizen markets.

Bottom line...lots of smoke and the fires are from bad apples rotting in public. I think it is about time I go buy another Glock. Maybe a 23 this time. :)

[paulsby]

18. good post

i use a glock 22 for duty, 23 for off duty (and when i do detective assignments)

my agency recently started allowing people to use the 17. some people were just having major difficulties with the sharp recoil of the 40 S&W guns, so we allow the choice to use the 17.

i agree with the points in your post. glock put together an innovative, reliable, superior product. and the market came ot them!

[aikoaiko]

24. Out of curiosity, how does the XDM9 stack up to the G17/19 in your opinion?

I'm ready to get an XDM.

[57_TomCat]

28. The Xd...

has more parts, and is a fully cocked striker design that many like but I do not. The fully cocked striker is my sticking point. It is being aggressively marketed and has been for longer than the new S&W M&P. Even so the M&P has more weapons in LE holsters and is picking up market share where the Xd is simply holding its own as a niche weapon for enthusiasts. I do not know of any major department that has adopted the Xd though several authorize it for individual purchase.

Maybe in time it will be more accepted. Glock torture tester Chuck Taylor has been giving a Xd the same treatment he has been dumping on his 100,000 plus round count Glock 17. He likes it but I have not seen much by way of follow up copy on the Xd in his hands.

[Tim01]

13. Also involved in training.

And with classes that frequently have a round count of 500 or 600 per day, the Glocks run like sewing machines.

[paulsby]

20. the main thing glocks are prone to is limp wristing

limp wristing WILL cause misfeeds.

we see it most often in the one armed shooting segments of our qualification. people don't get their body behind the gun and limp wrist it and it can jam.

[one-eyed fat man]

15. The Glock has its points

and as you say, "....that is an ENTIRELY different metric than for an agency adoption of a firearm. I have heard it put another way, that a 'Glock is for people who HAVE to carry a gun while a 1911 is for those who WANT to carry a gun.'

When agencies buy a pistol, the factors they consider are price, politics, and potential liability. Performance is rarely an issue. Training is not geared to ensure the officer will survive on the street, but to allow the legal department to defend the city against the lawsuit that will come even when a cop had to shoot the most richly deserving under the gravest of circumstances.

The Glock is the mechanism for morons. It meets the design goal of being simple enough to teach conscripts with no background in firearms to be minimally competent and the shortest amount of time with the smallest expenditure of ammunition. With only one control, the trigger, the 3 most important safety rules you have to teach a police recruit are:

1. Keep your finger of the fucking trigger.
2. Keep your fucking finger off the the trigger.
3. Keep your fucking finger off the fucking trigger.

Unfortunately, a good percentage of cops are only marginally competent gun handlers. They only minimally maintain their firearm and many shoot only when their agency requires them to qualify. Back when Colt's Official Police or a S&W M&P (the real one, K-frame revolver) were what cops mostly carried I knew cops had to be Irish 'cause I saw so many of them with "green bullets".

About ten years ago when the Louisville PD switched to Glocks they had a dozen reported negligent discharges in their first 2 weeks. In one incident, a sergeant killed his locker when his pistol discharged while he was tying his shoe. I have been shooting for 60 years and I still cannot envision a scenario where that could happen without "Darwin Award" level stupidity being involved.

[paulsby]

19. several more things

it's price, liability, ease of use, RELIABILITY, widespread availability, etc.

you sound cynical. i've been a cop 20 yrs+ and I am not as cynical as you.

i work for a good agency (i've worked for mediocre ones). OUR training *is* geared to help ensure street survival. our agency has beenpretty receptive to rangemaster and instructor input. i'll give the admin a B

[one-eyed fat man]

29. I may be cynical

but I have noted some things about bureaucrats, guns, and how they mix. This comes from 26 years active duty military, combat service in two wars and some security contracting for some years after that. I have dabbled in Bullseye pistol, OHMS pistol silhouette, IPSC and IDPA shooting. I do a little High Power, love the local Garand Matches and still hit the 1000 yard range at Scott Mountain on Fort Knox a couple times a season. BPCR with an original trapdoor is the the big hoot now.

Most of the folks I have known who could really, really shoot, were almost to a man, those who learned on their own time and dime. Without exception, only specialized units get sufficient range time and training to achieve any real proficiency, in either the military or any large police agency. I am not sure if "shooters" are drawn to join specialized units, or if the members of special units are just more likely to shoot for recreation too, but there seems to be a lot of correlation.

Liability concerns have cause agencies to modify weapons and training. DA revolvers with the single action disabled. Northridge bank robbers running amok because LA police training, like many agencies, penalizes head shots. Even though there is a lot of head you can hit that will only result in an ugly crook, the presumption is that taking the head shot gives the wailing widow cause to claim you were trying to KILL not stop. The cops did what they were told to do, shoot center mass and they kept doing it even after they saw it wasn't working. It is hard to think under stress but it is something competition helps engender.

Agencies prefer cheap mechanical substitutes to expensive proper training like burst control devices or heavy New York triggers. They give us such monumental failures like the M73 machine gun, which only proved that given enough money Springfield could build a worse weapon than the Chauchat. That they once in a while issue something effective and reliable is just serendipity.

[proteus_lives]

9. My dad is a big Glock man.

They are outstanding weapons.

[Euromutt]

10. What's secret about Glock's "path to profits"?

It's well known that Glock marketed aggressively to American law enforcement, selling at a thin profit margin to undercut the competition. The first autoloader I ever fired was a Glock 17, then newly adopted by the Dutch army as its new sidearm.

Glocks don't really work for me--despite the lack of external controls compared to other guns when the 17 came out, what controls there are are best suited for right-handers--but I can readily see they can work very well for others, indeed most people. My own opinion, which I discovered I shared with Marty Hayes, is that when somebody is shopping for their first handgun, the Glock 19 is the first gun they should look at.

And it is a landmark gun. The Glock essentially created a whole new class of handguns, to wit the polymer-framed, striker-fired autoloader.

[pipoman]

11. Great guns

I personally don't like the heavy trigger but practice can help overcome that.

The only real problem with the design IMHO is the breakdown procedure. I believe it has likely led to more unintentional discharges than any other design. The breakdown requires the gun be dry fired with the magazine removed, thus no magazine disconnect. Too often someone gets in a hurry while breaking it down and forgets to clear the camber. We have all seen the infamous video of the cop in the kids classroom who shot himself in the leg...this was (among other things) because of this breakdown procedure.

[Statistical]

14. Glock was inovative for the time but other companies have moved past them...

At the time of the invention of the first Glock a polymer framed, striker fired, high capacity auto was revolutionary. Today not so much.

The grip angle on the Glock simply feels wrong to me. Nobody naturally points their wrist like that. Well nobody human. Maybe Mr. Glock was an alien?

I sold my only Glock but I am happy that the company raised the bar high for polymer pistols. Today I just think Springfield or S&W make a better pistol for about the same price and they are American companies (although Springfield labor is not in the US I believe).

[benEzra]

16. The Springfield XD is a (fantastic) Croatian design...

made in Karlovac, Croatia by a company called HS Produkt. It is licensed and marketed by Springfield USA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Armory_XD

My wife shoots a Glock 26 9mm, and is quite the Glock enthusiast. Glocks are stupendously reliable and durable, although the ergonomics are a little bricklike to me.

Finances permitting, I'd like to get a full-size 9mm at some point, and at this point I'm undecided between a Glock 17, a Springfield XD9 Tactical, or a Springfield XD(m).

[Statistical]

17. Isn't competition grand? All 3 are nice weapons. n/t

[AtheistCrusader]

22. My full frame XD9 is my daily carry pistol.

Rarely leave home without it. Fantastic piece of hardware.

[krispos42]

26. I got to shoot an XD a little bit at the range

I had gone with a couple of friends and we had rented a Beretta 92 and an M1911. I can say I didn't really like either of them (yes, heresy to not love a 1911, so sue me). But a guy down the range had an XD. I had long decided that the XD was a gun I wanted to look hard at. I noticed that the grip on the Glocks was less vertical than on most other guns (slanted more rearward) and I had grown accostomed to shooting "regular" guns, so I was afraid if I had a Glock I might aim higher than intended in a crisis situation and miss my target.

So this guy was nice enough to let each of us shoot about 5 rounds out of the gun, his XD. And the gun felt molded right to my hand and it shot exactly where I was aiming at. I felt in absolute control of the gun. I loved it!


The only worry I have with the XDm is that it's built on a .40 S&W frame even in 9mm. They just change the barrel and recoil spring. Even the 9mm magazine is the same size as the .40-caliber one, they just stamp a few ridges into the sides of the magazine so it holds the 9mm rounds in the proper configuration. So you might as well get a .40... it's exactly the same size as the 9mm version.

The original XD is built around the 9mm cartridge, so it should be a bit smaller around. My hands aren't particularly large... the Beretta was a bit difficult to get a hand around. But the XD felt great around it. I'd go for the XD unless you have large hads. Just MHO.

[Euromutt]

27. The XD is the second gun I'd advise new handgun shoppers to look at

As I said elsewhere, for someone looking to buy their first handgun, I'd advise them to check out the G19 first. But I'd advise them to also look at the XD9, and maybe the S&W M&P. And I say that even though I went with an M&P myself, but that was for reasons other people might not have.

[57_TomCat]

21. Time to go home.

Parked the "government" gun in my locker. Just strapped on the Glock 26 for the ride south. What more can I say. :)

[Treo]

23. I Can't Stand GLOCKs

I think they're ugly, ugly, tupperware. I will never own one.

Now that I've made my bias clear, if they can provide a reasonably priced, (AKA saves my tax dollars)reliable, service weapon for police forces more power to them
EDIT Grammar

[IWannaKnowWhy]

25. Glock's "secret path" ain't so secret:

Glock's 7 step path to massive profit and success:

1. Identify market

2. Identify the products within the market

3. Identify flaws or shortcomings in said products, or unfulfilled sectors of the market

4. Create new product to address the flaws, shortcomings, or sectors previously found

5. Manufacturer product

6. Profit

7. Extra profit because a Glock really is so much better than its direct competitors