Facit (A story of a rise and fall and answers
to all dreams between), 2007 tells a story of a swedish
company Facit. A story about a rise and fall. As a parallel to the text
in the book (which only occures as a single word on each page) on the
opposite page, images from 3 different commercial lifestil magazines
are displayed, stories of success and ads, submerging in the Facit story,
creating a abstract, double and transformed mixture of success and failure.
text from book: Facit (Facit AB) was an industrial
corporation and manufacturer of office products. It was based in Åtvidaberg,
Sweden, and founded in 1922 as AB Åtvidabergs Industrier. Facit
AB, a manufacturer of mechanical calculators, was incorporated into
the corporation the same year. By the early 1960s the subsidiary Facit
had come to dominate the business of the corporation, and in 1965 it
changed its name to Facit AB. At that time, the corporation had a total
of 8,000 employees with subsidiaries in over 100 countries. In 1970,
the company had reached the peak of its growth, with more than 14,000
employees worldwide. In 1971, modern Japanese-made calculators was introduced
to the market, instantly making the mechanical calculators manufactured
by Facit obsolete. As a result, Facit basically went out of business
over-night. The general viewon this failure is that Facit met its demise
as a result of refusing to acknowledge the superiority of modern calculators,
as well as an unwillingness to adapt and change accordingly,to meet
the new demands from the market.Facit was sold off to Electrolux in
1973. In 1983 it was again sold to Ericsson, whereby an attempt to manufacture
microcomputers was initiated. During 4 years, the Facit home computer
became popular in Sweden. It offered some innovative solutions with
a programming language resembling BASIC.
However, as this venture didn't turn out to be a profitable one, it
was terminated in 1988.The company was subsequently divided between
foreign owners. The remainder of the corporation known as Facit AB was
finally terminated in 1998.
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