Just hit Avweb today:
Textron to acquire Pipistrel
Pipistrel has always been a very innovative company. Normally when a big conglomerate buys out a small innovative company, the innovation and agility suffers and the overhead costs go up. We’ll have to see how this works out. Textron is not really known for its agility. They do have deeper pockets than Pipistrel though.
ForeFlight doesn’t seem to have really suffered from the Boeing buy-out, but then it’s a software company vs Boeing being a hardware company.
Interesting development. Someone among the Textron ranks might see some potential for composite efficiency? Didn’t work so well with Columbia.
Likely Panthera is getting certified for real not as promise 
My guess is that Textron is more interested in the electric aircraft, and the associated electric aircraft certification experience, but it’ll be interesting to see if the Panthera does make it into production now that there’s some money available. Also what modifications may be done before its certified and goes into serial production.
Composite construction is one thing that Textron execs might find of interest, but as you say they already got that technology with Columbia unless Pipistrel has something more in that regard.
The Avweb reporter seems to have picked up on the electric/hybrid element, know-how and experience that Textron likely doesn’t have at all.
Didn’t work so well with Columbia.
That’s because the Cessna 400, despite having superb build quality, failed to learn the basic lesson of nature: you fold your legs up and away when you fly. Anything else is just plain wrong 
Like this:
you fold your legs up and away when you fly
😂
Damn right !
This is indeed a great loss for GA.
What should Textron do?
If one disregards the failed columbia experiemnt, the youngest design in the small aircraft/SEP category in the textron lineup is from the early 60ies. They obviously can not innovate by themselfes so they either have to leave the small aircraft market or source innovation.
It is indeed a great win for GA that they did not decide to leave the SEP market…
I am not sure that Textron failed to innovate. What they did was a failure to realise that “new stuff” is very hard to sell in the US. Maybe they knew it really but still hoped against all odds that they can change things, and failed. I don’t think they are stupid. You have to offer something really special, and they didn’t.
The US market is very conservative, which depending on your POV can be rephrased as “suspicious of stuff which has been time and time again proven to be unreliable”.
Apart from Cirrus (who is selling a traditional design which apart from avionics could have been done in the 1950s using the same components) nobody else has succeeded on the SEP (or MEP for that matter) market in the US in decades, and Cirrus did it only with a clever marketing push (the parachute, and the “happy family” imagery) which uncovered a whole new stratum of “non traditional GA” customers. The SR22 could not have been sold to the traditional US GA SEP buyer (in the numbers achieved).
So what has Textron really bought? They got an aircraft maker which knows the very-light GA business and is successful in it, mostly in Europe but also elsewhere.
So there is one oven-ready cash flow stream.
They are presumably also betting on selling these in the US and elsewhere; time will tell if that works.
They are presumably also hoping to do something with the Panthera. Again, time will tell, and I think they can succeed so long as they don’t comprehensively screw up the ad campaign like they with with the utterly banal Cessna 400/TTX adverts. It is a great design which is really fast for the fuel flow.
Pipistrel may have some composite technology but seriously how hard is this?
As regards electric planes, the real (cash generating) business phase is a long way away. We need much better batteries, and a revolution in charging provision, before this will work outside of ultra-narrow applications like banging circuits.
But there may also be something else which Pipistrel are working on. Could be drones? The Ukraine business has shown that this is an ultra hot market.
As for why Pipistrel owners offered to sell the company, well, it is hard to exit from a business you built up over many years but which isn’t on the stock market. Don’t I know it… Exit too early and somebody else makes the money. Exit too late and you get nothing for it. And being listed is a recipe for a heart attack because your business is now owned by a load of back seat drivers looking for a fast $$$$. There are various exit routes, which mostly enrich some fly by night “investors/VCs” while trashing the old business (partly because you had to fatten it up like a duck, with dodgy accounting, like capitalising stuff which in any normal business would be treated as an expense, while taking the hit on corporation tax; yes, seen that too), preferably not before the “investor” has made his exit with a nice profit. Years ago I had some contacts at Pipistrel which indicated that the company had lost the original exciting momentum, so it isn’t surprising that this happened.
