This is How Gibson Guitars Plans to Avoid Bankruptcy

This much is certain in spite of last week’s troubling news that iconic guitar maker Gibson Guitars is in financial trouble: the company is not going anywhere any time soon. Whether it comes to selling off assets, paring down, refinancing debt, attracting new investors or simply off-loading the company to an outside buyer, the brand will endure in some way, shape or form.

To wit, Gibson has now issued a statement outlining how they plan to proceed in the coming months. The tl;dr version is that the company will be refinancing its current debt obligations. This doesn’t necessarily “solve” the problem so much as it just kicks the can down the road for the company to deal with in the future, but it does buy Gibson some time to figure shit out and right the ship. Gibson also announced that they’d re-hired former CFO Benson Woo to replace Bill Lawrence, who recently left after less than a year.

Gibson Chairman and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz acknowledged the company’s recent issues, saying, “While the musical instrument and pro audio segments have been profitable and growing, they are still below the level of success we saw several years ago.” He added that the “company is concluding a thorough strategic and budget planning process to identify those areas where it can maximize its investments, and pare back areas where investments have not been performing to expectation.”

So: we’ll see. At least those automatic tuners are a thing of the past, but the company still has the colossal PR disaster that is their new Flying V’s to address. For now, Gibson stays.

[via Ultimate Guitar]