Fallen Boardroom · VIDEO ESSAY

The Rise and Fall of Amstrad: The £1 Billion Tech Giant That Put UK Online, Then Destroyed Itself

Subscribe to the channel!! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsf3CdPzMBjoeEpTAb5Uvsw?sub_confirmation=1 The Rise and Fall of Amstrad: The £1 Billion Tech Giant That Put UK Online, Then Destroyed Itself In 1968 a twenty-one year old from Hackney took £100 out of a Post Office account, spent £50 of it on a van, and started selling car aerials around London. Twenty years later Alan Sugar's company was making a pre-tax profit of £160 million a year, sat in the FTSE 100, and was worth more than a billion pounds. Amstrad had put a computer in three million British homes with the CPC 464, buried the typewriter with the £399 PCW 8256, bought Sir Clive Sinclair's entire computer business for £5 million, and taken more than a quarter of the European PC market with a machine that cost £399 when the American equivalent cost thousands. Then it applied the rule that had built it — buy the cheapest part that works — to a hard disk drive, in a machine sold to businesses that could not afford to lose their invoices. Profits fell from £160 million to £76 million in a single year. The recalls, the stock mountain, the courtroom fight with Seagate, the consoles and pen computers that missed, the failed buyout, the quiet decades building satellite boxes for Sky, the e-mailer that was supposed to put Britain online, and the £125 million sale to BSkyB in 2007 — the whole arc of the most successful electronics company Britain produced after the war, and the single decision that hollowed it out. The man who made that decision was not a fool. That is the point. Sources and further reading: Amstrad plc company history and financial record — https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/40/Amstrad-plc.html Amstrad plc corporate profile and chronology — https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/economics-business-and-labor/businesses-and-occupations/amstrad-plc Amstrad company overview, products and the BSkyB acquisition — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad Amstrad CPC 464 launch date, pricing and specification — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC_464 Amstrad PCW series launch, pricing and sales figures — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW Alan Sugar, What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography, Macmillan, 2010 David Thomas, Alan Sugar: The Amstrad Story, Century, 1990 Amstrad plc, Annual Report and Accounts, year ended 30 June 1988 Financial Times, reporting on Amstrad results and the PC2000 recall, 1989 to 1990 Grace's Guide to British Industrial History, Amstrad company entry You can contact me at: thefallenboardroom@proton.me This channel is made by an enthusiast who loves business and technology history — nothing more. All videos are for educational and entertainment purposes only and reflect my personal views and interpretations. I research each story carefully using publicly available sources, but errors or omissions can happen. Nothing here is professional, financial, or legal advice, and this channel is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any company mentioned.