Largest Knife Companies???

[mete]

Dexter-Russell is said to be the largest maker in the commercial knife maker.

 

[bearcut]

I think that is correct mete.

Wasn’t Camillus #1 until their demise?

 

[mrmaigo]

Dexter-Russell is said to be the largest maker in the commercial knife maker.

huge logo like theirs, I'm sure I'd have heard of them before

 

[phaserrifle]

huge logo like theirs, I'm sure I'd have heard of them before

it might well be that they don't sell thier knives under that name, but are an umbrella company which owns several other brands.

 

[hardheart]

The knives are Dexter-Russell knives, they sell a lot of them

 

[tltt]

Henckels and Wusthof, F. Dick, etc...... a lot of those old line kitchen cutlery lines are bound to be pretty large.

 

[2brothers]

The firm is the largest European cutlery company, with 1,700 employees.
About 900 work in central Switzerland in what is now labelled the Swiss Knife Valley,
while 300 staff are in the French-speaking part of the country.

Sales in 2008 – SFr485 million ($450 million U.S.).

The company makes 28,000 Swiss Army knives a day or six million annually.

Just found this info on a Swiss website, since Victorinox was celebrating it's 125th anniversary this month.

mike

 

[knifertheworks]

maybe alot of the cheap chinese made knock offs

 

[Knife Outlet]

All the big hitters would be in the kitchen knife category, not the sporting knife category. The sporting knife industry is tiny compared to the kitchen knife industry. I'm sure Dexter-Russell would be one the big hitters. So would Kai, Wusthof and Victorinox. Perhaps even Cutco. There are a lot of pretty large housewares companies that import kitchen knives. Cuisinart and Whirlpool would be a couple of examples. I don't know how you would rate those. Would you count only the cutlery portion or the whole company? If you count the whole company, not many knife manufacturers would make the list. The biggest of all could likely be one of the Chinese companies manufacturing for importers in other countries. I have no way to know.

In sporting knives it is really hard to know because the companies are either private or are a part of a larger company that does something else. I could make some guesses but I sure couldn't put together a definitive list. It gets hard, too, because some companies deal in both sporting and kitchen knives. Kai and Victorinox are examples and either one would be significantly larger than the companies mentioned by the OP. I'm pretty sure Boker is larger than any U.S. based knife manufacturer. Some of the importers are also pretty significant. Taylor and Frost, as examples, are pretty significant companies in the sporting knife industry.

Perhaps the OP needs to look for a ranking of just the high end U.S. based manufacturers.

 

[Leandroc]

What about Ontario, isn't manufacturing the most of knives they sell??
Cold Steel was a big manufacturer, but maybe after they send the production to Asia, Ontario became the number two, behind Victorinox (I think)
Do you agree?

 

[Knife Outlet]

No, I wouldn't agree. Ontario is a fairly small company. Cold Steel is not a manufacturer at all. They are designers, importers and marketers of cutlery. They are certainly one of the larger companies in the U.S. sporting knife industry but they wouldn't look so large against Boker, Victorinox, Kai and some of the others mentioned above. Don't get me wrong, both Ontario and Cold Steel are successful companies and both have great products.

If you define the comparison as high end U.S. based providers of sporting cuterly, then Cold Steel would be one of big ones. So I suppose it really depends on how you want to define it.