Titsup Sale...

[The Insider]

 

So 5 months after the staff were locked out, the creditors are finally moving in to get rid of the left over stock.
Sadly the sale is only for locals.... but at least one can see want can happen if you remain the same in and industry that is fluctuating.

Although its still sketchy to exactly what happened to Rsov, but will try to inquire further.
A few years ago the would have been in the top 10 online retailers here, but can only assume they didn't down size when the industry took a turn for the worse, which lead to there imminent fall... to the point the are losing money month and month to have a very sudden closure.

Hopefully all outstanding online orders in there dying days were refunded, Although sadly any order over paypals 45 day refund limit would have been totally screwed over!. 

 

Anyways.... for the local players here at least... there is a silver lining in that there are some bargains to be had in the current sale now on!

 

http://imgur.com/a/Q2Wjz

 

 

[chas]

Oh my God! So much stuff...

 

I was lucky enought to get a full refund from paypal, thank God.

[Gunnman]

Quite sad, actually.

[hitmanNo2]

Kart M14 EBR?  I thought they had been sold out for years.  There's going to be some interesting stuff in among that lot for sure.

[chas]

Kart M14 EBR?  I thought they had been sold out for years.  There's going to be some interesting stuff in among that lot for sure.

Are you referring to the first picture? I believe that's a Cyma Mk14 Mod. 1.

[hitmanNo2]

Ah.  Right you are.  I was looking on my phone and it cut the stock off.

[Wild_XIII]

It is kind of sad as RSOV was one of the first shops back when the Chinasoft revolution came about. I remember I got my JG M733 from there and back then it was incredibly rare to have a Chinese gun working that well!

 

They had a ###### load of stock so some people are going to get some awesome stuff!

[farrasdevell]

This is quite sad, many a great purchase from them over the years

[Gunmane]

The amount of rare replicas left must be astounding.  I remember when RSOV was the place to see new items pop up.

[Deve]

I liked RSOV in the early days, emailing Keith and haggling over discount.... Shame it's gone.

[TheFull9]

Ah memories, back when CYMA suddenly started churning out AKs that were actually quite decent for £100 (or even less for the plastic ones initially) and all of  sudden you didn't need £250+ for a competitive AEG.  I also remember e-mailing RSOV trying to track down some random bits of gear, probably only a few weeks after they initially opened, or at least from when they got 'found'.

 

Rather odd to see this happening really, there never seems to be a lack of demand for really cheap guns and gear.  Be interested to know what exactly they messed up so badly to get to this point.  Always a shame to see any decent airsoft business go under.

[bankz5152]

Someone should rock up and buy the whole lot, open another RSOV, if only just to properly sell whats left. I imagine all that stock will be heavily discounted. 

[Rob15]

It's a crying shame that RSOV with their decent service has gone yet EbayBanned with their (at least traditionally) appalling service is still going strong, nice guys finish last etc I guess.

 

Has the airsoft industry in Hong Kong really taken a downturn? I guess for those not in Hong Kong it'll always appear to be business as normal, in the UK things seem fairly stable overall and retailers I deal with seem to be doing alright and are continually after new stuff to sell.

[Deve]

 churning out AKs that were actually quite decent for £100 (or even less for the plastic ones initially) and all of  sudden you didn't need £250+ for a competitive AEG.

 

£35 for my Galaxy MP5K PDW in 2007.  Good times they were.

[hitmanNo2]

I bought a bunch in 2007.

 

Cybergun M1A1 Thompson £42.50
Galaxy MP5K £24
JG M4A1 £35
Unicorn (full steel) AKS-74U £67.50
Kart M14 EBR £67.50

 

Postage on top, but still.  That exchange rate back then. Good times.

[TheFull9]

*suitcase* son... I think I missed a lot of that because I got in to airsoft in mid-06 then joined up in '07 and didn't have a defence for a long time, so I didn't bother even window shopping for a good year or two at that point.  The things I'd do to have that exchange rate back.  Weird, immoral things.

[Skarclaw]

2006-2008 were the glory days... There was the arrival of clones, then the second wave which were actually really decent (as mentioned)

 

On top of that it was also the start of the "geardo" era... I think its telling that geardo isn't really a phrase in use anymore such is the proliferation of molle etc.

 

I remember browsing hk airsoft shops and various US gearshops and you could divide the price in $ in half and have a rough idea of how much it would cost..

[PureSilver]

Has the airsoft industry in Hong Kong really taken a downturn? I guess for those not in Hong Kong it'll always appear to be business as normal, in the UK things seem fairly stable overall and retailers I deal with seem to be doing alright and are continually after new stuff to sell.

 

My understanding is that airsoft in the UK and the US is in a severe slump. One of the 'big three' retailers in the US (Airsplat) went out of business less than a year ago, and a lot of the UK retailers I've visited have talked about slow business and desperate distributors willing to put things on sale-or-return. After several years of explosive growth it looks to me like aggressive expansion of supply has finally outstripped demand and now the market's saturated.

 

The owner of one of the surviving big two US retailers talks about it here:

 

[hitmanNo2]

20K SVD order.  Genius.

[Gunmane]

It's a confusing subject to talk about.  If you watched the Amped Airsoft podcasts recently, you will hear them take a stab at that video by talking about how their business has gone up in the time frame that GI has gone down.

[Yoroiden]

I tend to agree with Amped. I feel that airsoft in the US is stronger now than it was when I started 11 years ago.

 

I know it's strong enough that the company I work for was able to triple the size of our showroom in the last year. We also went from running games maybe every other Sunday two years ago, to games not just every Sunday but every other Sunday we're running games at two different fields.

 

If US airsoft is dying or in a slump, I'm not seeing it.

[Cannonfodder80]

I think it's the same in the UK, just look at the number of new sites and shops that have opened up over the past few years. However it is clear that the golden age of the cheap Chinese clones is on the way out as prices have gone up and some of the higher end manufacturers have released their own lines of budget guns and gear.

[DarkLite]

I think RSOV was a case of over-reaching. They were, at one point, one of the biggest overseas oriented retailers for chinese airsoft stuff and they expanded their offices and warehouse, but then a LOT of other, smaller, rival shops popped up and the market became a lot more competetive. RSOV didn't really do anything to counter that, or downsize to retain their profit margin when other retailers started taking larger and larger chunks of their market share.

It's a pity, because their in-house Vanaras and Hornbill brands had some very nice bits and peices for very attractive prices.

[Rob15]

20K SVD order.  Genius.

Indeed, watching that video and that little factoid makes me think the retailers/distributers that are struggling have kinda brought it on themselves by assuming the rapid growth that was once there would continue indefinately and over expanded, that's not just an issue in airsoft though, look at general retail, Tesco would be a great example of a retailer that thought it'd never stop, kept expanding then regretted it when things crashed.

 

I guess that's why the market looks different to me, I'm a small high end manufacturer which not long ago had a very small range of products so to some extent the only way is up as I expand my range and (slowly) pick up more stockists, I have had to shift away from focusing mainly on the niche/higher value items though after the carbon fibre suppressors where I ended up selling them at a large loss to shift the stock and free up the cash, now the focus is on smaller more common products (purely niche in a niche market does not make a viable business) which I can do a lot more of for the same sort of outlay and then the odd niche products now and then.

 

Finding stockists is a difficult thing to do though and always had been even with a very low minimum order value for trade pricing, many retailers seem reluctant to spend a bit of cash to add new products to their range even when they tell me they need a product I make and their customers have been asking them for them which seems baffling to me although as I've already said the retailers I do deal with seem to be doing alright and generally speaking are taking more of my products, both in range and volume. In some ways I think I'm also in a decent position at the moment, bringing all production in-house has cut R&D costs vastly and production costs to the point far more products are economically viable to make at a time when parts from Asia seem to be increasing in price and GBP is lower so for international customers all my products have dropped in price in real terms.

 

In all it just sounds like general retail, there are always winners and losers, new stores/manufacturers starting and older ones going bust but without any sort of official industry figures I'd say it's hard to tell which direction airsoft is going, probably the best we have in the UK would be UKARA membership figures but afaik they don't release those?

[BerserkDS]

Airsoft is definitely dying here in southern California. Where the Big 3 are/were and many smaller shops are either struggling or have gone out of business. Echigoya USA closed their doors just about a year of opening. Within a 80 mile radius of me, There was 8 fields, now we're down to 2 fields.