Quoted Text
Not to hijack this thread, but I have a stupid question about reboxing. I appreciate the info from the prior post, but I'm curious about a few more things. First off, how does a company such as Tamiya end up 'reboxing'? Do they purchase the molds from the original company? Why would a company sell their molds? Presumably that means they have no intention to continue production in the future? In the case of Tasca/Asuka, it seems that there are only a few kits still available from them. Are they no longer in business?
In some cases, the original company is defunct or reorganizing, and the molds have been sold outright (lots of Eastern European molds have made the rounds of multiple companies). When ICM went through a bankruptcy few years ago, several of their existing molds went to a company called Alanger, for instance. Many Eastern Express kits now appear in Ark boxes, and some were snagged by Zvezda.
The 1970's Peerless Max kit molds are now owned by Italeri (after a brief stop at Airfix), and are sometimes reboxed by Revell/Germany and Zvezda.
Renwal's molds from the 1950's now belong to Revell, and are reissued, mainly as nostalgia items.
In some cases, the original owner simply no longer wants the molds--Dragon's first generation of Soviet armor kits from 1989/90, which were very inaccurate, were sold off to Zvezda, and now sometimes reappear in Revell/Germany and Italeri boxes (Zvezda retains ownership, and probably ships the bagged parts to Germany and Italy for packaging).
Gunze Sangyo's facilities were damaged in the Kobe earthquake, and they leased or sold their tank kit molds to Dragon in Hong Kong, who replaced Gunze's multimedia parts with all-plastic components. They were sold as Shanghai Dragon or Dragon Imperial Series kits for a while, and Gunze retained distribution rights in Japan. Most of these rather good kits have since been displaced by better, newly-tooled, Dragon originals.
Whether the molds themselves travel probably depends on local import duties--if it's cheaper to mold in-country, they probably travel. Otherwise, the original company may just ship the parts. What's the advantage? Sometimes a company doesn't have a distribution system in that part of the world, and it's cheaper to partner with a local company.
In the case of Tasca, which is located in Japan, it's hard to say exactly what happened. The head of their Sherman kit program reportedly left the company, so it's unlikely it will be expanded. Perhaps somebody on their board decided that Tamiya's vast, worldwide distribution network would allow them to amortize the costs of the molds much more quickly--higher volume at a lower price point (which is fine by me).
