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According to the 2016-2017 annual statement they gave about 200 design staff and all design and manufacturing is done in nottingham. Product and supply costs were about £2.6m and total revenue was £160m for £38m profit. Not a bad mark up

Overread wrote:At the same time something like a codex might well have a higher profit margin than some other products. Eg a higher priced Knight or a special character might both take far longer to recoup their investment as they are smaller sales per customer and higher production value products.

So it could be that a codex gets a higher mark up to help cover other products so that in total GW can support its running costs day to day; not just in the long term.

They might also be marked up slightly more because unlike most models, people need to only buy one for each army they play. Meanwhile on the model side, a block of 50 guardsmen is 5 boxes of product. With that in mind, the codices are probably marked up enough to recoup the losses as quickly as possible.

Cheeslord wrote:

 Overread wrote:
At the same time something like a codex might well have a higher profit margin than some other products. Eg a higher priced Knight or a special character might both take far longer to recoup their investment as they are smaller sales per customer and higher production value products.

So it could be that a codex gets a higher mark up to help cover other products so that in total GW can support its running costs day to day; not just in the long term.

Current behaviour at GW suggests they agree with you. 8th edition has pushed a lot of books on people with not a huge number of new models released...

Um....the entire Primaris and Death Guard ranges were the big releases of June-November, and then Nurgle got big updates in January. We got Arminger Knights in March, and new Knight variants coming soon. A new Necron hq, and resin Marbo and Eisenhorn (haven't checked, not sure if they are still selling or if they were limited). That is a decent number of new models, its just they were focused mostly on making ranges from scratch rather than new kits for each faction like they used to.

I'm hardly an expert, but I have worked in a facility that did commercial injection molding. So I'll describe the process and speculate from there.

Resin molding happens essentially at room temperature. You mix your material of choice, pour it in the mold, and wait. This is economical for small batches, because you need very little overhead. But you can't really scale up production much. You need lots of molds worked by lots of people, and you can't reduce the curing time spent by each casting.

Injection molding starts with raw plastic in the form of grain sized beads. Your injection molding machine heats the plastic to liquid form, and squirts it into a steel die (a two part mold). After a couple seconds the machine pops the die open and ejects the finished sprue into a bin. Once the machine is up and running, it can go through a cycle in a matter of seconds, and keep going for hours and hours. The machines are expensive (as in six figures, easily), and each die--the mold that makes one sprue or frame) will cost tens of thousands of dollars. With injection molding, you invest heavily up front and make your money back with mass production.

Now, the costs for operating the machines are fairly fixed. Your raw material is a bulk commodity, super cheap. You can predict the cost of scheduled maintenance in advance. Overhead and labor costs are constant also, in the big picture. Your enemy is downtime. You've paid for all this stuff, you need it producing valuable product as much as possible. You don't leave the machines sitting overnight--you run day and night and weekend shifts. Your biggest source of downtime is changing jobs: stopping a machine, removing the die, prepping it for another job, putting the different die in, and starting it up. If machine A is going to be spitting out Cadian Infantry Squad sprues all day long, it has no downtime. If machine B is going to do some Armiger Knight sprues, and then some Killa Kan sprues, and then some Exalted Sorcerers, it's spending hours of its day getting worked on.

Now think about all the different sprues GW sells. They're gonna sell lots of, say, Primaris Inceptor squads, but not so many Land Speeders. The difference in cost between the two has nothing to do with how much plastic is in them or how complicated the sculpt is. It's almost entirely a matter of volume. It's cheaper, per unit, to manufacture 50,000 of an item than to make 500. Low-volume products--the kits that get sold in the fewest numbers-- cost more to make.

This is interesting:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/04/prweb365936.htm

"Manufacture has recently transferred from Wisbech to Nottingham, where 13 modern high precision moulding machines, operating 24/7, have replaced 20 older machines ...In a typical week the crane from Street will handle over 120 die transfers. With each die costing more than the crane itself and weighing around one tonne..."

So that's the picture. About 13 machines to make all of the different sprues in GW's inventory. Almost 20 die changes a day, each machine is doing less than one change-over per shift, which is pretty good.

If they ever need to replace them you could make your whole army for cheap buy buying it off them for a few mill.

 Earth127 wrote:
Yeah but the big cost is in the writing and editing , not the printing.

I know, i Said that it my post that those are "retail prices" and GW probably has a discount or contract with s publisher at whole sale prices. And as mentioned you can/should factor in labor cost for the artist, writers, etc.... Long story short there is eaily a 200+% markup if not more.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 John Prins wrote:

 Earth127 wrote:
Yeah but the big cost is in the writing and editing , not the printing.

Don't forget shipping. Not by ship, that's the cheap part, but shipping to distributors - generally by truck - can get expensive.

And warehousing.

Oh goodness yes, warehouses are surprisingly costly, one way or another (cheap warehousing usually isn't close to convenient shipping, and warehouses close to shipping aren't cheap). It's no wonder my mail orders from GW are shipped from Memphis, TN rather than somewhere in Canada. It's literally cheaper to eat the shipping costs than to keep a Canadian warehouse!

Well i can at least answer about the part of manifacturing i kinda work on.
The molds used to make the sprue made by GW are incredibly expensive. A mold of that type generally run you about $250k nowadays. As a comparaison when they released the new rhino, the molds cost them 250000 pounds. And that was a long time agoo.
Thats just making the mold and does not include the green sculpt.
oh seeing post above looks like they are using much bigger mold than they used to. the kind that makes several sprue a t once. Ok then replace numbers by "holly gak" .

But with a 30+ million profit then they can afford to make as many mold as they want.

 lolman1c wrote:
But with a 30+ million profit then they can afford to make as many mold as they want.

That's not how publicly traded corporations work.

I think probably GW makes a few, small molds for promotional purposes - like the free giveaway Primaris SM you could get by buying 8th ed when it came out, but they're not going to make lots of big molds unless they're reasonably sure they can make a profit from each. Now, keep in mind that the lifetime of a steel mold is pretty long, so you can stretch that out a long time to see a profit in the end. The Rhino mold has probably been very, very profitable over the years!

 lolman1c wrote:
But with a 30+ million profit then they can afford to make as many mold as they want.

Yes, they can afford to make molds (and there have been plenty of new models this year and last year) but they also need to find production slots for them which is the bigger problem for them at the moment.

They also have to be for things that will sell well enough to pay for the mold otherwise there isn't going to be profit to pay for more.

 Dynas wrote:

 Earth127 wrote:
Yeah but the big cost is in the writing and editing , not the printing.

I know, i Said that it my post that those are "retail prices" and GW probably has a discount or contract with s publisher at whole sale prices. And as mentioned you can/should factor in labor cost for the artist, writers, etc.... Long story short there is eaily a 200+% markup if not more.

No. They are prices for PRINT ON DEMAND service which is always going to have lot more expensive prices than doing real book order from printing company. Thinking print on demand prices are what GW pays is simply wrong. They pay only faction of what you would pay for them on print on demand.

By my best etimates It's probaly in the 6 figures to maybe 7 figure for very big projects.

I'm pretty certain GW uses really high end molding techniques. and moulds, meaning they're probably more expensive than regular market ervices offered. Tough they can do it cheaper because in house production.

It's very hard to get hard figures since this is data that companies keep really close to their chest.

As a Patternmaker (the people who make injection moulds) I know roughly how much it would cost to produce a high detail / high quantity mould and the continued operating cost of said mould. Something like a box of Intercessors would need to sell ironically 40,000+ to break even.

Moulds be scary pricey.

38m pretax is a nice profit, though worth noting that 7.5m of that was from brand licensing, so discount that if you're just thinking about product sales.

You can also expect a chunk of that profit to go back into the company for next year's developments, R&D and fixing up Nottingham. They paid out 23.8m in dividends of pure unused profit which is 15% of total revenue. Still not to bad.

While there's no financial figures attached one interesting comment that came out of a recent live stream was on the development of the AT knight figures. Even though the AT knights are just a rework of the existing Questor class knights files it still took a sculptor 3 months of work to get it production ready for the new game.

Behind each of the staggeringly costly moulds you've probably got just as much outlay in design and development costs.

Esasb wrote:

 lolman1c wrote:

Stux wrote:
... due to it being China plastic, but their regular models with the normal plastic is VASTLY superior (even if it costs more, i'd happily pay the current prices for models over cheaper China plastic)

There's a such thing as "China Plastic"? I thought plastic was plastic:
Polyethylene terephthalate (PETE or PET): PET is the most widely produced plastic in the world. ...
Polyethylene (PE): ...
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC): ...
Polypropylene (PP): ...
Polystyrene (PS): ...
Polylactic Acid (PLA): ...
Polycarbonate (PC): ...
Acrylic (PMMA):

If you just mix up your own or change the recipe, doesn't that cancel your contract? I'd imagine GW specifies they want their models molded out of polystyrene up front, not some PS *whatever* mix. Plus at approx. $1500/TON I don't think there's any incentive to adulterate the mix.

Just my $0.02.
Heybiff




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
I think finecast was out-sourced, but far as I know the metals (in the past), resin (forgeworld) and all plastics are made in-house. Bases might be imported, books are likely printed and imported etc.

Finecast was made in-house. GW needed a resin that was compatible with the old latex molds and cheap -- hence finecast. They anticipated that metal prices would skyrocket and made the decision to move whole-sale to plastic, but needed a transition material. Metal didn't go up, but the shift happened anyway.

My *limited* understanding of plastic production puts the sprue cost at "cents" on the cost of box. All but the largest kits, most of the materials cost is in the packaging and shipping. Plastic is literally cheaper than dirt. Unless they are making production runs in only the hundreds of thousands of units, and they probably aren't, each individual sprue is pennies, the cost of bulk plastic being what it is. Also, the cost of mastering a mold has plummeted in recent years, only bringing down development costs.

There was an article about one of the companies that printed codexes a while back before 8thed. Just thinking through standard costing, if a codex is $45, wholesale is $25, and assume 50% profit on that, after shipping. So, I'd assume GW is getting them by the container load for approx. $12 a unit.

But I'm just some guy, what do I know. My numbers could be waaaay off.
Heybiff

Chemical structure is but one part of what makes a plastic. They can vary wildly in quality, heat resistance etc. based on what additives you use in both the polymerisation and the moulding process. Gw probably uses a highly specific process tuned between mold-machine-plastic composition to create optimum result.

 Earth127 wrote:
Chemical structure is but one part of what makes a plastic. They can vary wildly in quality, heat resistance etc. based on what additives you use in both the polymerisation and the moulding process. Gw probably uses a highly specific process tuned between mold-machine-plastic composition to create optimum result.

Everyone does this. it is part of the process engineering. Already costed.

Heybiff <---NOT a materials engineer

I know but it's still an (unknown) part of the cost. I was mostly answering lolman.

Hankovitch wrote:
I'm hardly an expert, but I have worked in a facility that did commercial injection molding. So I'll describe the process and speculate from there.

Resin molding happens essentially at room temperature. You mix your material of choice, pour it in the mold, and wait. This is economical for small batches, because you need very little overhead. But you can't really scale up production much. You need lots of molds worked by lots of people, and you can't reduce the curing time spent by each casting.

Injection molding starts with raw plastic in the form of grain sized beads. Your injection molding machine heats the plastic to liquid form, and squirts it into a steel die (a two part mold). After a couple seconds the machine pops the die open and ejects the finished sprue into a bin. Once the machine is up and running, it can go through a cycle in a matter of seconds, and keep going for hours and hours. The machines are expensive (as in six figures, easily), and each die--the mold that makes one sprue or frame) will cost tens of thousands of dollars. With injection molding, you invest heavily up front and make your money back with mass production.

Now, the costs for operating the machines are fairly fixed. Your raw material is a bulk commodity, super cheap. You can predict the cost of scheduled maintenance in advance. Overhead and labor costs are constant also, in the big picture. Your enemy is downtime. You've paid for all this stuff, you need it producing valuable product as much as possible. You don't leave the machines sitting overnight--you run day and night and weekend shifts. Your biggest source of downtime is changing jobs: stopping a machine, removing the die, prepping it for another job, putting the different die in, and starting it up. If machine A is going to be spitting out Cadian Infantry Squad sprues all day long, it has no downtime. If machine B is going to do some Armiger Knight sprues, and then some Killa Kan sprues, and then some Exalted Sorcerers, it's spending hours of its day getting worked on.

Now think about all the different sprues GW sells. They're gonna sell lots of, say, Primaris Inceptor squads, but not so many Land Speeders. The difference in cost between the two has nothing to do with how much plastic is in them or how complicated the sculpt is. It's almost entirely a matter of volume. It's cheaper, per unit, to manufacture 50,000 of an item than to make 500. Low-volume products--the kits that get sold in the fewest numbers-- cost more to make.

This is interesting:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/04/prweb365936.htm

"Manufacture has recently transferred from Wisbech to Nottingham, where 13 modern high precision moulding machines, operating 24/7, have replaced 20 older machines ...In a typical week the crane from Street will handle over 120 die transfers. With each die costing more than the crane itself and weighing around one tonne..."

So that's the picture. About 13 machines to make all of the different sprues in GW's inventory. Almost 20 die changes a day, each machine is doing less than one change-over per shift, which is pretty good.

Great post, the only thing I would add to that is that the cost of the molds has gone WAY down. Back when they used to get Renedra to do there mold cutting and plastic work yeah molds where expensive as all outsourcing is . Now they do ALL aspects of the mold cutting in house. From the CNC'ing of the aluminum or steel blocks, to the CAD design of said CNC'ing....it's all done in house basically the machines they use are LONG paid off and all they are paying is for the hourly wage and the raw materials for mold making.

Oh btw, you know that link was from 2006 right?.... I'm positive they have upgraded machines again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Rolsheen wrote:
As a Patternmaker (the people who make injection moulds) I know roughly how much it would cost to produce a high detail / high quantity mould and the continued operating cost of said mould. Something like a box of Intercessors would need to sell ironically 40,000+ to break even.

So your saying molds for the Intercessors cost around 2.8million? (Canadian) or 1.4million£?....

So do you think, as prices go down ect...

1) they will ever re price the models to make them cheaper. Soke of the finecast is almost 15 years old and still full price which is almost unheard of from a company.

2) they will ever test with 3d printing?

2) they do and have done for ages.

 lolman1c wrote:
1) they will ever re price the models to make them cheaper. Soke of the finecast is almost 15 years old and still full price which is almost unheard of from a company.

No. The persistent rumour is that members of the Board won't allow price reductions (which is why they've been circumvented by the Start Collecting! boxes, and doubling the content of other boxes.

 lolman1c wrote:
2) they will ever test with 3d printing?

GW do a lot of 3D printing in-house. FW recently showed off a 3D printed Mole prototype on WarhammerTV.

Far as I know they use 3D printing for many of their master sculpts now (as do a lot of other companies). However its my impression that 3D printing still has way to go before it trumps plastic casting, especially for mass production.

The power of 3D printing is one machine that can print almost anything you want without having to change components of the machine (save for making it bigger if required). So the machine cost to change a design is basically just the raw materials (again excepting a vast change in scale).


That said the nature of 3D printing and the layer lines you get might be a reason its ok for masters but not for a product (it takes ages to get 1 mould line off models properly; imagine if they were layers of lines!)

Hmm, so in about 5 years when the teck advanced they might even test it more. Could this lesd to cheaper prices?

And damn that board! It makes no sense to not have sales every so often. I'd probably buy a lot more from gw if they did sales at Christmas and stuff.

 lolman1c wrote:
Hmm, so in about 5 years when the teck advanced they might even test it more. Could this lesd to cheaper prices?

It depends on the material. What I'd like to see is something like the Sacristan Forgeshrine sprue - being able to choose individual, pre-existing CAD bits and have the printer sprue them up and print them.

 FabricatorGeneralMike wrote:

 Rolsheen wrote:
Something like a box of Intercessors would need to sell ironically 40,000+ to break even.

So your saying molds for the Intercessors cost around 2.8million? (Canadian) or 1.4million£?....

Do you think the cost of the mold is the only cost?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 lolman1c wrote:
Hmm, so in about 5 years when the teck advanced they might even test it more. Could this lesd to cheaper prices?

And damn that board! It makes no sense to not have sales every so often. I'd probably buy a lot more from gw if they did sales at Christmas and stuff.

Cheaper? Not for the main items in the medium term. What we might see is prices dropping for new models that will sell in small quantities. Those are the ones that will be the first to see benefit from 3D printing compared to traditional manufacture.

Would you buy more in sales whilst spending the same? That's bad for GW. They would need to see that you'd spend more total through the year. For a lot of people that isn't the case.

Yep for GW if they put on a sale then its profit that they are giving away and nothing else. If that doesn't link up to people spending more money on models then GW might make the same profit for larger sales volume as they would have if they didn't have the sale anyway.

Don't forget GW products are not seasonal and many many companies use sales to push specific products. They use them to clear lines to make space for new stock; to clear out winter clothes in the spring and summer; to get rid of perishable goods before the expire. They can even use them to clear stock that they over-ordered on and which is taking up storage space and not selling fast.

GW doesn't have any of that so they've no reason to push sales on specific models. In fact at present with their production setup if they are to retire a model they don't need to boost its sales because they are not sitting on a huge backlog of stock anyway. So any big surge in sales would require more money from GW to cast up the required models.



It's a solid reason why we don't see GW sales that often if ever from GW itself. They've basically no reason to push their own sale rate; remembering that they already sell to 3rd party which often sell at discount anyway.

 FabricatorGeneralMike wrote:

So your saying molds for the Intercessors cost around 2.8million? (Canadian) or 1.4million£?....

Do you think that interecessors sell for 35$? They are sold to retailers for 19$, and that's after packing, stocking and shipping. The "value" they get out of intercessors is probably around 1$ per model, so yes, to recoup from design and mould expenses, 40000 boxes are a good estimate.

But I don't buy models at all from GW. XD If theybhad a 20 or 30% off sale at Christmas then I would spend way more than I usually do on ebay.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Spoletta wrote:

 FabricatorGeneralMike wrote:

So your saying molds for the Intercessors cost around 2.8million? (Canadian) or 1.4million£?....

Do you think that interecessors sell for 35$? They are sold to retailers for 19$, and that's after packing, stocking and shipping. The "value" they get out of intercessors is probably around 1$ per model, so yes, to recoup from design and mould expenses, 40000 boxes are a good estimate.

I somehow got about 1k point for about £50-100. I'm not sure how, they were all new on sprues as well. I think I just got ebay lucky.

GW wont made prices based just on how much cost produce a model/book, they have almost monopoly about this kind of games (large scale miniature battles), so they dont care a lot, they want sell you Magnus for 105$ they do , cause you cant find anything similar anywhere else, simple. Gw is still so healty cause no one else made a game close to warhammer 40k , most offer skirmish games or their miniatures are just ugly or too much complex set of rules, Gw make nice mins and a simple set of rules so it gets the upper hand, if a day another brand will raise to compete with GW you ll see how their prices dramatically will get lower, cause of competition, is a simple market rule, if just one offer a thing he can ask lot more if 100 offers the same the sell price will crumble....