Fabrique National

In general, I am impressed with the long arms that come from FN.

I own an FAL, in fact.

What I am not impressed with is their utter lack of follow through (US civilian market only).

They are epic purveyors of the one-off.

Rather, they produce lots of different designs in small numbers, give little parts support for a short period of time and then completely abandon the design when the new-hotness is developed.

The FNC was pretty nice gun with miserable timing.  They'd just started importing the things when the AWB hit.  If there wasn't already an FN-USA making guns when the AWB expired, I would say just bail.  Putting complete tooling here and making them for the American market made sense; especially since they are forbidden by the Colt technical data package to offer M16 clones.  They let it lie.  Heck, they are still making the military version, why no parts support or new semi-auto?

Because they have a new 5.56 gun!  The FS2000.  Perhaps the best bullpup rifle ever fielded.  But there's no user serviceable parts readily available.  Plus it's expensive.  Very expensive.  And kinda goofy looking to the American market.  It's also out of favor because there's yet another 5.56 gun from FN!

Enter the SCAR!  Also expensive.  Also poorly supported.  At least all three of them take standard M16 magazines.

OK, so that's three assault-rifle look-alikes in production at the same time.

I have a proposal for FN.

1. Build up the spares supply by cutting production 5% on whole guns.
2. Bring back the FNC as your "cheap" line.  It's a good gun and should be able to compete with the AR on quality.
3. Pitch the lighter weight and improvements to move people up market from the entry level gun.  Think not of the FNC as a product siphoning off sales from the SCAR, think of it as the product that gets them to try the FN brand.
4. Make owning an FN the sweetest experience anyone has ever had!  If problems occur, fix them fast, with a smile and eat all the costs.  Great customer service is a loss leader.  Bad customer service is just a loss.
5. Don't offer any bells and whistles for the FNC, just the iron-sighted rifle; with an option for a top rail.
6. Fulfill your promise of 6.8 guns for at least the SCAR.  There's no reason not to make the same offer for the FNC.
7. Admit that the FS2000 is a niche product and pitch it that way.

Where this would leave them is the entry level FNC (which was designed to be inexpensive to make) could easily be a $1,200 gun; perhaps even sub kilobuck.

I think it's a winning strategy.