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Speaking of plastics, dont plastics have to do with oil/petroleum? Conspiracies say we hit peak oil a few years ago...(not that I really care)

My opinion doesnt matter anyways seeing I'm so indecisive I havent bought anything from anyone for months now

For your amusement (note, not my creation. I thought it was funny. If its offensive I'll tear it down)

A the previous report has GW stating an inyent to move more figures to plastic production because there is less volativity in the price of plastics even with oil price fluctuations.

Obviously that is going to be in relation to metal prices which are not goodm but the wording was still indicating stability in plastic prices.

the materials price of the stuff GW makes is a few percent of the total cost at most. It's pretty much irrelevant to the price discussion. Polystyrene was about $1 per lb last time I looked, do any of GWs kits weigh a pound in total? Metals figures are probably a lot more driven by materials pricing, but how much do they weigh maybe an ounce each? Tin is at an all time high price of $11/lb. so being generous there is maybe $0.60 in each metal figure materials wise. It's a PR move to bring it up as justification for price rises.

Has anyone here ever even consider that, GW is not a franchised company and have stores under direct control world wide, which costs money. ALSO how many or if any other miniature hobby out there actually have a store for them selves, lets not even talk about the staff they hire to help / start people to play the game. This is like saying why are Louis Viton bags... YES BAGS cost $2000 if you're lucky, when i can pick up a normal sports bad for maybe $50.

lord marcus wrote:

Scott-S6 wrote:

wildger wrote:I think you people are crazy enough to continue to play WH or 40K while there are many other good games out there at a much lower price.

Other games that let you field a hundred models and finish the game in a couple of hours?

Kings of war.

£15 for 10 skeleton archers from mantic vs £18 for 16 skeletons archers from GW.
£25 for 10 skeleton cavalry from mantic vs £18 for 8 skeleton cavalry from GW.
£12.50 for 20 skeleton warrior from mantic vs £18 for 16 skeleton warriors from GW.

Really doesn't seem much cheaper to me. Core units are cheaper but the others are more expensive.


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asmith wrote:the materials price of the stuff GW makes is a few percent of the total cost at most. It's pretty much irrelevant to the price discussion.

Very true.

GW's profits are currently about 10%. So when you buy that £35 landraider there's approx £3.50 left after everything has been paid for.

That's about the same margin as Hasbro Toys (but a fraction of the volume - Transformers alone sold triple what GW sold in '07). Bandai are currently getting around 7% margins on models and toys but are turning over around 20x what GW does.

GW is not a large company. They have a lot of stores and an enormous product range (and every product has a cost associated with it in terms of moulds, stock, printing, storage, shelf-space) but they do not have the volume of sales to fully support it.

If they dropped the price on that landraider till there was zero profit in it, it would still be £31.50. The only way prices are coming down is if they slash the product range by dropping a whole bunch of armies. Even closing stores doesn't really help since they make less by selling to indy stores.

Scott-S6 wrote:
£15 for 10 skeleton archers from mantic vs £18 for 16 skeletons archers from GW.
£25 for 10 skeleton cavalry from mantic vs £18 for 8 skeleton cavalry from GW.
£12.50 for 20 skeleton warrior from mantic vs £18 for 16 skeleton warriors from GW.

Isnt that a little unfair? The weird unit amounts makes me think you're using the Tomb Kings. Vampire counts is their equivalent (granted they have been updated so they are a little nicer except their old metals)

So in reality compared to black knights it would be £25 for 10 skeleton cavalry from mantic vs £75 for 10 skeleton cavalry from GW.
£12.50 for 20 skeleton warrior from mantic vs £30 for 20 skeleton warriors from GW.

asmith wrote:These are numbers from their last financial report.

But you've taken the pre-operating costs numbers.


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kenshin620 wrote:

Scott-S6 wrote:
£15 for 10 skeleton archers from mantic vs £18 for 16 skeletons archers from GW.
£25 for 10 skeleton cavalry from mantic vs £18 for 8 skeleton cavalry from GW.
£12.50 for 20 skeleton warrior from mantic vs £18 for 16 skeleton warriors from GW.

Isnt that a little unfair? The weird unit amounts makes me think you're using the Tomb Kings. Vampire counts is their equivalent (granted they have been updated so they are a little nicer except their old metals)

So in reality compared to black knights it would be £25 for 10 skeleton cavalry from mantic vs £75 for 10 skeleton cavalry from GW.
£12.50 for 20 skeleton warrior from mantic vs £30 for 20 skeleton warriors from GW.

Why are vampire counts more equivalent than tomb kings?

If anyone wants to take a look on the little white boxes which the GW paints get delievered to the store in, the are MADE in France, and PACKAGED in China.

Go figure......

Maybe I have discovered the root of the problem

Scott-S6 wrote:

If they dropped the price on that landraider till there was zero profit in it, it would still be £31.50. The only way prices are coming down is if they slash the product range by dropping a whole bunch of armies. Even closing stores doesn't really help since they make less by selling to indy stores.

I don't think you are correct here at all. GW operates at a very large gross margin much larger than just about any business you can think of. The fact that they can barely turn a profit despite this huge margin I think is attributable directly to these stores. To put it simplistically they are earning a lot of money and then spending it all before it shows up on the profit line. Bad business practice is not something that provides value to consumers, with GW you are paying directly for it.

Meh, nevermind. Move along, nothing to see here.

asmith wrote:GW operates at a very large gross margin much larger than just about any business you can think of.

That's ridiculous. Lots of industries operate on several hundred percent markups or higher. After a decade spent sourcing product from China I know exactly how cheap many of the things we buy really are.

The gross margin is neither here nor there as it takes nothing of the operating costs into account. GW operates an extremely large range of injection moulded product for a company of reasonably modest turnover. Every product bears a cost and yet the sales of many items are quite low.

Would the product range be strengthened by cutting the number of units in order to reduce the prices on the remaining ones?

Name one without looking it up... I bet you'll be suprised.

All their injection molding and production is taken into account in their gross margin number. So that doesn't have anything to do with anything. Likewise any low sellers they may have are also accounted for in their gross margin number. I don't think their number of products has anything to do with their operating costs. So in answer to your question no it wouldn't help.

asmith wrote:................................Bad business practice is not something that provides value to consumers, with GW you are paying directly for it.

I think you are confusing bad with unique business practices.

GW has grown from being the first importer of RPGs to Europe to being the biggest (premier?) wargaming manufacturer and retailer in the world. It has done this off the back of the retail outlets that it basically uses as advertising.

Now in the US you have [it would appear] to have many LGS, in the UK [Europe?] we do not. What we do have is GW store everywhere. So I can understand that you see the GW store model as flawed but it simply under pins everything that GW are. If they took away those stores and concentrated on manufacture only then they would diminish as an entity, cease to be able to offer amount of releases at the rate that they appear and eventually fold. No good thing for wargaming.

On topic. Made in China? Who gives a feth! Nearly everything in the room I am sitting in was made there. None of it cost me any less because of it.

I'd actually worry if it was made here or in the US more. Useless, lazy bourgeois pigs that we are.

as far as i know there isnt even a GW store in all of California all LGS's and comic shops

I think this is the biggest difference between the UK and the US. in the UK there is a store everywhere and is where everyone gets introduced to to games workshop. In the US 99% of people are never exposed to a GW store. I am in an urban area and there is no store within a 4 hour drive of me as far as I know. So the stores basically do not exist for the US consumer, yet we are paying for them through inflated pricing.

I only say bad business practice because they make a huge gross margin and have little profit to show for it, this is usually regarded as bad management.

10% isn't a bad margin (net profit). As I pointed out, Hasbro toys makes about 10%. Bandai toys and models make 6% and doing pretty well at the moment.

Personally, I think GW need a new equivalent to Hero Quest and Space Crusade with the national level tv-advertising that both of those games had. They made good money for MB games and got a generation of players into the hobby.

notprop wrote:

asmith wrote:................................Bad business practice is not something that provides value to consumers, with GW you are paying directly for it.

I think you are confusing bad with unique business practices.

GW has grown from being the first importer of RPGs to Europe to being the biggest (premier?) wargaming manufacturer and retailer in the world. It has done this off the back of the retail outlets that it basically uses as advertising.

Now in the US you have [it would appear] to have many LGS, in the UK [Europe?] we do not. What we do have is GW store everywhere. So I can understand that you see the GW store model as flawed but it simply under pins everything that GW are. If they took away those stores and concentrated on manufacture only then they would diminish as an entity, cease to be able to offer amount of releases at the rate that they appear and eventually fold. No good thing for wargaming.

On topic. Made in China? Who gives a feth! Nearly everything in the room I am sitting in was made there. None of it cost me any less because of it.

I'd actually worry if it was made here or in the US more. Useless, lazy bourgeois pigs that we are.

Also in addition to this, when have you ever seen GW advertise anywhere? By that I mean TV and Radio, Newspapers etc.

And they seem to have done pretty well without that up to now. I can't think of any other business which has grown oer the years as GW has to become a worldwide company and doesn't actually advertise. It's pretty amazing when you think of it.

Just throwing that out there.....

@ scott -s6: I think you are confused about what a gross margin is and are conflating it with some other term. Games Workshop's gross margin is 75%!

asmith wrote:Name one without looking it up... I bet you'll be suprised.

I don't need to look anything up. Most consumer electrical goods are higher margins than that.

A table lamp costing £2.50 from the supplier in china will generally retail for £12-13 (excluding tax).

@ the decapitator: In my opinion that is a good example of one of their bad business practices that makes them charge more.

asmith wrote:@ scott -s6: I think you are confused about what a gross margin is and are conflating it with some other term. Games Workshop's gross margin is 75%!

I know exactly what gross margin is and I know exactly what it's used for. Net profit is a vastly more significant figure.

You say that GW makes "little profit". Their net profit margin is better than bandai toys and hobby.

Scott-S6 wrote:

asmith wrote:Name one without looking it up... I bet you'll be suprised.

I don't need to look anything up. Most consumer electrical goods are higher margins than that.

A table lamp costing £2.50 from the supplier in china will generally retail for £12-13 (excluding tax).

So name a company with a higher gross margin. Better yet name one with several hundred percent gross margin. I know you can't because the highest gross margin you can even theoretically achieve is 100%

@ asmith - precisely, you already had a saturated market for comic/LGS when GW first started taking the Warhammer universes to the US. That was a gamble that didn't work and the reduction in the US store was the result.

Were as in the UK this was never the case. Even now I have 3-4 GWs within 20 minutes drive. The nearest non GW retailer is Wayland Games and thats only a warehouse (still I drive 30 mins there for that sweet, sweet 20%!).

I think the best way to account for the GM/profit discrepancy that you indicate (and I have not looked at the GW figure since they were realased so I may be wrong ) is that they are still expanding i.e. more of those expensive stores. I believe in the CEO's statement he went as far as to state that those looking for significant returns should look elsewhere, GW are a company that is looking to sustain growth over the long term and not look to take profits.

asmith wrote:

Scott-S6 wrote:

asmith wrote:Name one without looking it up... I bet you'll be suprised.

I don't need to look anything up. Most consumer electrical goods are higher margins than that.

A table lamp costing £2.50 from the supplier in china will generally retail for £12-13 (excluding tax).

So name a company with a higher gross margin. Better yet name one with several hundred percent gross margin. I know you can't because the highest gross margin you can even theoretically achieve is 100%

Lets be clearer on terms then.

The example above is a gross profit of 80%. Equivalent to a markup of 400%. Many of the customer of my previous employer had markups of over 500% and that was marked up over our (the importer's) price, not the manufacturer's.

GW's gross is 75%. Not particularly high or low for a company in retail.

Their net profits are 10% at present. Quite reasonable for their market sector.

Do you want to justify the "low profit" comment? And provide an example of company in a related sector which makes net profits substantially higher than that.

they currently have 10% profit because of all the extreme measures they have been taking over the last several years. 10% profit margin is overall not that high, but if you look at it in comparison to the gross profit margin it is extremely low.

Now please backup your claim that 75% is even close to a margin most other companies operate at. You are going to struggle to find even one company outside pharmacueticals that operates close to this level. Most retailers who you claim operate at a 75% level actually operate below 20%.

Scott-S6 wrote:

asmith wrote:

Scott-S6 wrote:

asmith wrote:Name one without looking it up... I bet you'll be suprised.

I don't need to look anything up. Most consumer electrical goods are higher margins than that.

A table lamp costing £2.50 from the supplier in china will generally retail for £12-13 (excluding tax).

So name a company with a higher gross margin. Better yet name one with several hundred percent gross margin. I know you can't because the highest gross margin you can even theoretically achieve is 100%

Lets be clearer on terms then.

The example above is a gross profit of 80%. Equivalent to a markup of 400%. Many of the customer of my previous employer had markups of over 500% and that was marked up over our (the importer's) price, not the manufacturer's.

GW's gross is 75%. Not particularly high or low for a company in retail.

Their net profits are 10% at present. Quite reasonable for their market sector.

Do you want to justify the "low profit" comment? And provide an example of company in a related sector which makes net profits substantially higher than that.

so according to you its impossible to have a gross margin over 100% as that would mean you are making the item for free which is mathematically impossible...so in that case scott 1, a-smith 0

I think you meant that the other way around no?

no i didnt, asmith, i agree with scott more than you, i think you two are more or less saying the same thing, but in different ways and because english is such a horrible language, it appears as if you are differing on your beliefs...but i agree with the way scott states it better...its like "i like chocolate" versus "chocolate, me like!"


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gawd i suck at analogies

You can't have a gross margin higher than 100% unless someone is paying you to take their product right?

And actually we are not saying the same thing at all. He is saying that they are justified in their pricing because they are making a reasonable profit and their gross margins are in line with other businesses (which I still maintain they are not, they are much higher than just about everyone else). I am saying their pricing is high because their gross margin is very large compared to just about everyone else, and there resulting profit margin should be much higher (actually prices should be much lower) if they operated at the same profit margin to gross margin ratio as just about every other store or manufacturer people deal with operate at.

yea, and hes not denying that, scott is saying that their 75% gross margin is average, which is true, and that their net profit (which is the more important figure) is only 10% which makes sense as well