History (1996): Boeder Sells RPS Acquired in 1991

RPS (Noisy-le-Grand, France), a maker of magnetic computer media, was sold off entirely by Boeder to the French private group LSPC (Paris, France) under the direction of M. Lobbezzo.

The German seller had acquired RPS from Rhône-Poulenc chemical group in 1991.

RPS has a factory in Albi, in the south of France, with a maximum yearly production and duplication capacity of 100 million floppy disks, a large portion of which go to major Japanese clients.

In collaboration with an English firm Distronics, the Albi plant is also engaged in audio CD, CD-ROM, CD-V and CDI pressing, with a maximum capacity of 54 million units per year.

The company had already signed over its magnetic tape production activities to Anacomp.

RPS has commercial subsidies in all the major European countries, and has recently founded a new distribution and purchasing subsidiary in Singapore, supervised by Christophe Cazes.

The new group can claim FF400 million in business with personnel numbering 250.

This transaction is no doubt the result of Boeder’s financial difficulties since last year. According to an RPS spokesperson, their alliance with Boeder was far from fruitful to the extent that the German company, more oriented towards large scale distribution, did not know how to integrate RPS’ professional product into its own distribution networks.

Since its inception, RPS has had a tough time finding a significant place for itself in magnetic media, for one thing because it is essential. If a company is to underwrite production of this kind of product for it to manufacture mass market audio and video media as is the case with most of the French firm’s competitors, rather than limit oneself solely to computer media as RPS has always done.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 100, published on May 1996.