Depends upon how you look t it.
In essence Briggs are only a componant supplier.
As factories chase lower prices for componants Briggs will be forever be squeezed to make a lower priced engine so their fate is sealed.
Selling off the whole goods divisions will only produce a temporary reprieve and put off the inevidable.
Immediatly post WW II the managemen thinking was controlling the entire production, called vertical intergration.
I will illustrate with BSA as that is what I know best.
They bought their suppliers from the coal mines right through to the steel suppliers, the tools used to make motorcycles and the trucks use to deliver them
The only bits they did not own were Amal carburettors ( 30% stake ) Jones / Dunlop / Singer ( wheel rims ) where they had a percentage in all of them & Lucas where they had no stake.
They owned the iron foundries that made the cylinder barrels and the aluminium foundries that cast the cankcases so even if their models failed & the competition out sold them, they had the profits from supplying their competitiors to fall back on plus the sale of non motorcycle related items, like Motoplas making plastic parts for the white goods industry or the forge making push bike parts for Raleigh ( who bought the push bike division in 1964 )
In the final 6 years, the non motorcycle entities were not only covering the losses of the motorcycle division but actually producing profits.
The USA went the other way, the catch cry was "own the market" so the idea was to either buy , merge with or bankrupt all of your competitors till you became the monopoly supplier and thus you could set the prices for the market.
Then we had all of the Harvard graduates ( yes it did come from Harvard ) who came out with the brilliant idea of "core business" so all of the big companies went gar gars selling off everything that was not directly making their product.
Thus companies like Briggs became assemblers rather than manufacturers , buying in as many parts as possible in order to force a cheaper price.
The next nail in the coffin was another Harvard idea "brand name value" so the brand name became an individual saleable entity divorced for the manufacture & distribution of the end product. The poster child for this was Sara Lea
In our domain think Ryobi, Mikata ( petrol ) etc. This saw a profusion of products bearing the brand name of well known companies just being a rebranded bought in product ( JD push mowers for instance ) most of which were some what sub standard.
Ultimately Horizontal intergration is a disaster waiting to happen because if that sector of the market suffers a prolonged down turn then you are stuffed big time, think car companies during the oil crisis.
HD saw this and after going to the wall, set themselves up to make a lot more of their motorcycle & supply parts into the general trade making handlebars & wheels .
IMHO if Briggs are going to survive as a company they need to keep making whole goods and in particular top end products like Simplicity and push the quality aspect over trying to make them cheap enough for HF or Wallies.
But marketing has to change & they need to make their dealers into distribution centres for on line purchasing so they can be reasonably price competative & retain their dealer network
Simple things like offering 10 year extended warranty provided servicing is done by the dealer over a 1 year standard warranty
And then the quality & longevity of the engines has to be increased so the Briggs engine becomes considered the top end engine, not the cheapest.
China has a long term plan to dominate the world and they are using the greed & corruption of Western businesses & people themselves to do it.
They had the post WWII history of Arabia , Japan, Singapore, HK & Korea to use to create business model that would lift the country into the 21st century without plunging them into the mass poverty of the British East India company days, and to date it is working perfectly.
The collapse of Tecumseh firstly made a market available for cheap & nasty Chinese engines and secondly it put price pressure on all of the remaining USA factories due to reduced volumes of USA / Canadian steel & aluminium pushing the local price up.
In the 2015 calendar year the biggest volume small engine maker was B & S with Honda distant second the next 5 were all from China then Kohler, Yamaha, Kawasaki & Suberu the around another 10 Chinese companies.
That was the last year of this particular analysis as it then changet to USA centric survey to make the non-Chinese sector look healthier than they are.
Liffan is the biggest engine maker if you include their motorcycle engines .
