Belkin Finalizes the Deal to Acquire Linksys

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Linksys lives on as a Belkin brand

Back in late January Belkin announced it would be buying up the Linksys brand from Cisco, a company that seems utterly determined to exit the consumer market as quickly as possible. It was hard to imagine anything would sour the deal given how determined Cisco is to liquidate non-enterprise brands, but we can now confirm its official.
Belkin announced today the deal is final, and they intend to push forward with plans to maintain the two brands separately, but will combine R&D efforts.
"Linksys has a rich heritage, a passionate customer base and a wide product line, all of which fueled our decision to acquire the company and our plan to maintain the Linksys brand," said Chet Pipkin, CEO of Belkin. "The Linksys portfolio will continue to exist and evolve to include even richer user experiences and network management functionality. Smart Wi-Fi is an innovative and easy way for consumers to stay connected to their home network and we look to continue investing in it by adding more features and products."
The big take away here is that Linksys will continue to honor outstanding warranties, and will be releasing new products under its own banner for the foreseeable future. In fact, given how aggressive Cisco was at slapping their own branding on Linksys products, you might actually see more of them now. The odds are fairly high that both companies will offer little more than rebadged variants of each other’s products over the next few years, however consolidation in this low margin hardware market was inevitable.
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