So I was talking with a friend about this merger, we've come to the speculation that the merger allows for three beneficial points in the view of AI and EcoTech and it all comes down to money:

1) Buying power. Lower cost to produce = bigger margins.
2) Elimination of price competitions. Either avoid lowering of prices due to competition or possibly the next generation of modules will have higher pricing. No need for price wars = bigger margins.
3) Technology sharing. Maybe the modules will become more interchangeable via controllers, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the next generation of modules and/or the next year of marketing, whichever comes first.

This is a good point that is easy to forget. I frequently remind myself that the online world is just a fraction of the people that actually have marine aquariums.

Everyone can speculate. From any merge that I've seen it's usually not good for one of the companies involved. But I don't have a business degree so I'll leave it at that.
Ecotech products: overpriced, good product, not the best reliability and good customer service
AI products: reasonable pricing, good product, fairly reliable and poor customer service.
Be interesting to see the changes or if any at all.

I think we as consumers will see very little change.

I know retailers are hoping for better margins as both the AI and the EcoTechs have very small margins and no bulb sales to make up for it. :p

The issue of margins is more to do with the strength of the USD. Retailers have to stay within a certain limit of affordability, otherwise the unwise end user (and we find there are many unaware) will think they are getting a cheap deal from the USA not realizing the credit hit they will see at the end of the month.

This means the CAD price is typically lower than where it should be and in doing so hitting both dealer and distribution margins.

I'd like to retract this as they finally got back to me with good results. They did'nt respond to voicemail from a couple of weks ago but responded within minutes this morning via email