PWCC contract with SGC cancelled???
 

OK, let me preface this by saying I am NOT a graded collector nor know the ins and outs of grading and big time seller industry.

But a friend of mine who sends ungraded cards to PWCC just told me he talked to them today and PWCC told him PSA just bought SGC, and cancelled the contract PWCC has to get cards graded by SGC.

This does not sound legit to me. Does anyone have any info?

I don't want to start a bad rumor, but my friend is an attorney and this is the story I got directly from him.

My friend is put off because PWCC only sells graded cards he tells me, and he can't get his cards graded by PWCC through SGC and with the long wait for PSA they may be going to Beckett.

Does any of this make sense or is my friend getting a story from PWCC?

I have posted elsewhere I heard this was in the works although I was accused of fake news by the SGC faithful. It certainly would not surprise me, at all.

I started hearing rumblings about this a little over a week ago.

So, if true, I guess the big story here is PSA or their new parent company is buying SGC!

What does this mean for graded collectors? Especially those who specialized in SGC. Not to mention there were sets SGC would grade that PSA would not.

What happens to values of SGC graded cards?

If this all comes to pass part of the answer may depend on PSA's stance towards crossing, I would think.

Are You Kidding me ?? Oy Vey

Conspiracy against the Black Apron.
This will not bode well for anybody except the puppeteers at the top.

I have no direct knowledge, but no I am not kidding at all, I have heard this from several sources. And it's certainly consistent with PSA ownership obviously having a strong mergers and acquisitions background, and having actively made acquisitions already, not to mention having a lot of money in general. And if you're Dave, and someone is offering you enough millions, why not take it?

No monopolistic move with that purchase at all….. :eek:

Unbelievable well..... 2021 in this Hobby Maybe Not. Wow

That's often how these industry consolidations go.

They are already raising prices hugely with impunity. SGC is not a constraint on their pricing IMO.

Newport Beach Division and Boca Raton Division.

PSA is grading 25K cards a DAY. I doubt SGC is even a small fraction of that.

I like SGC, but I don’t see the threat to PSA, nor do I see any synergies in acquiring them. Completely different philosophy. I’ll believe it when I see it

I guess everyone has their price……

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lgj3_W...Y24OYCMrncxrrc

this is certainly true.
one thing that SGC might bring to the table is capacity. they are the only grader who solved the bottleneck problem and invested in their own capacity. PSA might be a little worried about losing some business for making people wait a year for cards. If they acquire SGC they can probably cut their backlog in half. SGC has definitely mastered the grading process.

I admittedly haven't done a sophisticated analysis, but neither is this AT&T thinking about buying Sprint, or even PSA as public company needing shareholder approval, it's one very wealthy guy and his partners. If they can take out probably their best competitor for relatively little money by their standards, and acquire badly needed graders in the process, why not do it?

Maybe there will be one registry for all graded cards if enough mergers/buyouts happen. This is one of the main reasons as a collector, I would never grade a card until it’s time to sell.

To me PSA is Arrogant enough to not honor SGC grades. Don’t put it past them.

God I hope this doesn’t happens, Dave Keep The Company Please.

FWIW, I spoke to Brent and he said "We haven't sold to PSA. We are still our own entity".

Nobody suggested PSA had bought PWCC, did they?

I'm assuming that he was referring to Brent Martin.

I took it a different way but was wrong :)
.

I see, not a name I knew. Phil did you ask him the follow up question, are there discussions?

But they make up for it by honoring their own when confronted with proof of alteration.:eek:

Yes, I was speaking of Brent Martin, I find it easier to just ask sometimes. I'm not really comfortable asking him follow up questions since it's not my business.

I hear you, and people not under oath often aren't truthful anyhow in my experience. Come to think of it, even under oath...

Of course it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Should they merge in some way or sell outright perhaps they will make SGC the vintage card grader for Collectors universe.

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Presumably, the transaction is larger enough that it will need to go through the HSR anti-trust review process at the Federal Trade Commission. Prior to HSR, both companies must continue to act independent and there are significant proscriptions against sharing certain types of information, as well as against the acquiring company directing the activities of the acquired company.

So, the statement above can be factually true, even if the deal has been agreed to by the parties.

Brent used the word "still" maybe that was significant in context. I can't remember the HSR thresholds now, I'll have to look that up. They're fairly large though. I thought the transaction size had to be somewhere around $90 million.

No doubt. I wanted to get some feedback from an SGC rep in case they want to make a larger statement here or on their website.

I posed the question to Nats Turner on Twitter and he asked where I heard it so I directed him to this thread. Would be interested to see what he says.

Interesting response by NT...

No it's not true. Big fan of Dave though

If true, I wonder if the Anti-Trust Dept. of the Justice Dept., now under new management, might like to review the deal.

Good news for collectors that there is no deal. I am pleased to be wrong. It's interesting because this one went way beyond the usual hobby rumor mill or I would not have even mentioned it; I heard this from multiple well-placed and very credible sources.

I agree very good news for collectors. Im glad PSA didn’t Buy SGC 👍🏻

All the SGC guys on this forum are like ...

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i..._uCsk&usqp=CAU

Damn, I was going to start selling SGC tuxedos, for PSA prices.:D

Weird that we were hearing the same thing independently, at the same time.

:)
 

:)

My best guess is that this talk did not come out of thin air, but that what happened is there were discussions but they did not result in a deal.

Mike, for the moment you're good.:cool:

Pete....
 

I appreciate the sentiment but as Frankbmd can tell you.......

I'm always good! :) :cool:

I appreciated the harmless banter, it was just a tad easier than getting shot at in Afghanistan 2010-11.....

Peace, Mike

Yes. So "weird." Lol.

Exactly, Good For SGC they have a strong brand that is worth plenty.

Thanks for posting, Nat and welcome. I am curious however what specifically is not true? There were 35 posts before yours with mentions/inferences of PSA buying PWCC as well as SGC. Are both statements not true, if you can say?

Blowout, which I was told you have been a member, has numerous threads about a possible buyout of SGC, over the last week and last I checked I did not recall seeing you post on any of those but maybe you were not aware it was being talked about.

Appreciate your time.

didn't see any of the blowout ones, someone just sent me a link to this one on twitter somewhat randomly. it's not true that we're acquiring them.

That was me. Thanks for coming and providing your input.

[s]PSA are not doing anything that resembles anti-competitive behavior. They're buying out a competitor, which is totally allowed.
Honestly, their price hikes probably were pro-competitive, as it made a not-insignificant amount of people shift from subbing to PSA to subbing to SGC.

Regardless, this is a letdown. SGC had really been taking the boom in stride and seemed to be getting ahead of their growing pains. Will be interesting to see what happens next. :([/s]
WOOPS, just finished reading the thread. Glad to see no merger. Excited to see how both companies evolve as we come out of the boom!

It's moot because Nat has said there's no deal, but you obviously are not familiar with the Clayton Act, the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, etc. People should not make pronouncements about the law when they don't know it. Many mergers and acquisitions have been challenged successfully by the government because they substantially lessened competition. So no, buying out a competitor is not "totally allowed," it depends.

Would the heavy hand of government really come down to prevent a card grading service from eating up another one? Beckett is still out there, plus the new one (SCG or whatever), and entry into the market by a new entity is not prohibited by licenses or contracts that would stop them (for instance, a company can't automatically produce baseball cards without first obtaining licensing rights from MLB, the Players Association, and so on...)

I would rather be on the defense side of this (now not happening) transaction for a variety of reasons including the low entry barriers you reference. I doubt it even meets the notification thresholds and I also doubt that even if the government looked at it, it would be challenged. My point was only to correct the egregious misstatement of the law, not to opine about this specific ((not happening) transaction.

I'm familiar with HSR and Clayton! Been doing lots of reading on anti-trust over the past few years. Very interesting field right now.
I don't see how this proposed merger would have been blocked by the FTC. An HSR filing would definitely be needed, given the size of PSA, but I doubt there's a denial of the proposal. The vast majority of mergers are approved, and this particular acquisition doesn't strike me one which would be flagged. There are several other legitimate competitors (BGS, CGC/CSG, HGA). PSA's pricing has not been manipulative (again, if anything, their pricing – often what the FTC has chosen to focus on in the past, though the Khan-led Commission may change that focus – has increased their competitor's business). This is a field which does not concern public welfare or essential services – another area where the FTC has been laissez-faire in the past decades. Additionally, recent upstarts have been able to grow, which can be construed as a lack of anti-competitive behavior (see: many of the contentions about the defensive acquisition of nascent firms by established technology giants as of late).

They would likely have just paid the filling fee, waited, and gotten approval. FTC/DOJ is still hands off for the most part, and they are looking to focus their efforts in a specific field.

So why on earth, given that you have some understanding of this area, would you make a clearly wrong general statement like buying out a competitor is totally allowed? I am confused.

Not sure about HSR applying. There's a size of the transaction requirement that has to be satisfied before you get to size of the parties. I think it's 90 million or close to that.

Don't disagree, as I already wrote, that even if reviewed government not likely to take action.

I've been saying for a couple of years now that Apple Inc. should write AI software to grade cards. They would give PSA and SGC a run for their money. Their "Customer Service" would be #1 and there wouldn't be a backlog!

Yeah but it would only work with an iphone app and an $800 piece of hardware that needs to be upgraded every two years.

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Neither of them do that.

Perhaps I wasn't clear but we have certainly seen PSA reaffirm its grade on cards outed by BODA.

I go back to my original post that started this thread.

Why would PWCC tell a consignor that PSA was buying SGC and that PWCC's contract with SGC was being cancelled?

Is there an ulterior motive PWCC would have to tell a consignor this story that Nat is denying?

BGS has done it a couple of times last year as well.

Probably Spoke Out of Place When he Shouldn’t have. A story usually always changes a little from each person it’s passed down to.

Maybe PWCC is not having s good time with PSA lately and is looking to shake the tree a bit???

Maybe the actual info was lost in translation between the 5+ people it went through before being posted here.

FWIW I spoke again to my friend who is the one who spoke to PWCC. So first of all not 5 + people did this go through, just once removed from the conversation.

He was getting ready to send cards to PWCC to be graded and listed on ebay when a PWCC employee named Aaron Hanan (Maybe some here know him) informed him that PWCC lost it's contract with SGC to have cards graded by them. The reason given was that PSA was buying SGC as I first reported.

Thus my friend did not send his cards to PWCC.

I don't think there can be much if anything "lost in translation" here. I don't mean to put out false information, rather I am just repeating information I received from my friend that I just reconfirmed today.

Maybe PWCC has some reason for telling my friend this, but I have no idea what that could be.

Will be interested to see the outcome of all of this.

A more believable reason would be due to their history of submitting altered cards in my opinion.

Boom I didn’t wanna say it but you said it perfectly.

As I’ve said before the guy spoke out of place not the gentleman’s friend the guy he spoke to at pwcc.

Hope so.

So after years of knowing what PWCC is and does, Dave suddenly cuts them off? That doesn't make sense to me.

I'm curious to see if the tin foil hat crowd has some substance here.

It’s Not Happening I commend SGC for standing strong and keeping their company!

Peter, I’ve been through three corporate mergers and in all three my managers emphatically denied there were any type of transaction in process. Of course, after the mergers ( I had still had jobs with two of three, at least for a “while”,), the word was these managers knew about the acquisitions but were sworn to secrecy under threat of litigation and were instructed to say the rumors were not true. Much of this, I am sure, was due to federal secrecy and non disclosure requirements...

Just my two cents from my past of misdirection and big money. Denials mean not a wholehelluva lot to me, no offense intended to anyone responding in this thread.

Duly noted. It's unfortunate but in this world you have to just take a lot with a grain of salt.

Was thinking the exact same thing.

I meant that neither company backs up any sort of guarantee. Even if they're completely wrong.

SGC no longer even has one.