I discovered many infos about Merloni and ASKO ...
sure 100%. That make has nothing to do with Miele, Bob is right, it's a rebadged Samsung.
Even the ASKO washer/dryer combo is made in other, non-ASKO Merloni lines.
True ASKO-made washers haven't any door boot, the door "shakes" along with the outer tub as in commercial washers.
Otherwise I really doubt any company would buy from Miele. They had to sell at higher prices than Miele.
Another reason : Asko is owned by antoniomerloni.it, a company who always worked as contractor only.
Before the arrival on market of other strong competitors - Turkish (Vestel and Arcelik), Korean (LG and Samsung) and Chinese (Haier) - Merloni produced for big box stores own brands and other true commercial companies.
Since these new players came out they tried to recover purchasing local brand as Servis (UK), EBD/Seppelfricke/Foron (DE), Edy/Elin (NL) and the ASKO industrial plants in Sweden and Finland.
Asko purchase could have been their best move, but they supplied well-built ASKO appliances with the very same boards (sourced from Elmarc) they use on other appliances of the group. These electronic boards seems to be the main cause of warranty costs in the group ...
I got these infos from a report on antoniomerloni.it homepage.
As some branches ("ASKO" and "Merloni tanks and cylinders") perform much better than other ones (AR.DO), Italian law allow an extra ordinary administration led by external managers (assigned by the court) as a rescue from bankrupcy. This is the report from those managers :
http://www.antoniomerloni.it/doc/Relazione - Gruppo Antonio Merloni.pdf
