The identity crisis of the world’s friendliest evil corporation

Valco is the world’s friendliest little evil corporation. We’ve been openly admitting for ages that our ultimate goal is to build our own Death Star and subjugate all of humanity. It’s an honest and ambitious goal, and we work toward it every single day.

But when I look at the audio market in 2025, the joke starts to stick in my throat. We’ve realized we’re complete amateurs. Turns out, it’s painfully hard to be a greedy and ruthless world conqueror when your competitors are lapping you on both sides in the same role.

There’s too much money on the table

The headphone market isn’t some pocket change business. We’re talking about a global industry worth well over a hundred billion euros, growing faster every year. That’s a mountain of cash. With that kind of money, you could buy a few small countries, colonize the Moon, or even pay off half of Finland’s national debt.

When there’s this much money on the table, the game gets brutal. If you look around, you’ll see the true nature of the market.

First up, there’s Apple. They’ve managed to do what we can only dream of: they’ve built a perfectly closed ecosystem and own half the entire market. Apple probably already has its own Death Star somewhere.

The scale is completely absurd. If Apple’s headphone business alone was spun off into its own company, it would have the same turnover as all of Nokia. One Apple accessory rakes in as much cash as Finland’s biggest industrial giant in stock market history. The Finnish “world domination” effort looks like bad summer theater in comparison.

Who owns your sound?

If you’re not buying Apple, you might think you’re getting traditional Western quality or a slice of rock history. Odds are, you’re wrong. Corporate acquisitions reveal the harsh truth about where the profits are really going these days. 

Even Swedish rock credibility eventually got a price tag: exactly $1.15 billion. That’s what Chinese investment firm HongShan paid for a majority stake in Marshall Group.

The same pattern repeats everywhere. 

German Beyerdynamic was sold to Chinese Cosonic, and Samsung has swallowed nearly every other hi-fi brand from JBL to Bowers & Wilkins. Most of the rest are owned by either a Chinese investment firm, a Japanese conglomerate, or an American tech giant like HP.

The smaller player Bose (turnover about $3.2 billion) is a refreshing exception, since it’s owned by the trust of its dead founder and MIT.

Brutal oligopoly and us

This situation puts us in a strategically weird and slightly embarrassing light. The market isn’t fairly divided—it’s a brutal oligopoly. In reality, a handful of giants vacuum up about $98 billion from the market. The crumbs left on the floor are licked up by a thousand small players trying to survive under the giants’ feet.

We’re one of those thousand crumbs.

We’re the only idiot planning to set up our own headphone factory in Puolanka. While others are selling themselves to China or running “side businesses” bigger than Nokia, our plan to tinker with headphones in Finland looks a bit odd.

It inevitably causes a bit of an identity crisis. We try to act like an evil corporation, but the end result suspiciously looks like honest entrepreneurship.

New strategy: Dual-use technology

In an emergency board meeting, we concluded there’s only one logical option in this situation. We have to escalate. Since we can’t beat the competition with money or evilness, we need to accelerate the original plan.

The solution came from an unexpected direction.

When we asked the authorities about funding options for starting up the Puolanka factory, we learned that in today’s world, we should consider so-called dual-use technology. Apparently, there’s plenty of EU funding for that right now.

This suits us perfectly.

Building a Death Star takes too long without outside funding, but if we call it a “dual-use project,” we can get the EU to pay for part of the firepower with joint debt.

So, we’re going to keep making high-quality, repairable, and excellent value-for-money headphones, because we need our own share of funding for this government-recommended Wunderwaffe program.

This plan also gives us hope.

If this small team can make headphones that are fully competitive—and often even better—than the products of these empires with bottomless budgets, we’re not far from our goal.

We don’t need to grow much more to start making the kind of dual-use technology that conquers the world.

The only way to one-up the global giants is to subjugate all of humanity with futuristic dual-use technology. It’s a tough solution, but the market situation and EU funding guidelines don’t leave us much choice.