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Bases are how? As it is getting new boxes with round bases is inferior move...Since in AOS bases are irrelevant you can have them in square bases and use same models in MULTIPLE games. With round bases issues comes in ranked games.
Square bases=ultimate flexibility. And as per AOS rules bases are irrelevant.
They may say bases don't matter but in reality they do; everyone measures from the base, and everything GW produces for AoS shows round bases.
Some as simple as the "new" bases being in the box can give the impression of the whole box being new or better.
I don't know why white packaging is better though.
This is all about beng cutting costs.
A 25 mm round base needs less material then the 25 mm square one.
The white boxes uses less paint.
I am might be wrong but these are my thoughts.
As a large number of reboxed minis have gone from 25mm to 32mm I don't think that's it, and to my understanding with production methods paint is paint, white or otherwise.
But there's certainly an argument of fewer boxes having more purposes is a logistical saving.
You got me on the packing, part but I would counter on the bases. Now that all GW uses round bases you dont need to change the machinery to produce square, since "The hobbit", 40k and AoS uses round ones. With this you spare time to change out moulds. Also you dont need extra moulds for square bases to produce and maintain.
I thought GW outsourced bases to China these days? In any case, dropping half of their base range should result in a significant saving from an economy of scale / stock / packing point of view - They double production of the round bases, and there are less bins of bases for the packing staff to deal with. With the scale of base production that's probably a significant saving accross the company.
But their profit % went down, so something has cost them a lot more to do. Lower ROI on new AoS kits? More store overheads?
Herzlos wrote: I thought GW outsourced bases to China these days? In any case, dropping half of their base range should result in a significant saving from an economy of scale / stock / packing point of view - They double production of the round bases, and there are less bins of bases for the packing staff to deal with. With the scale of base production that's probably a significant saving accross the company.
I don't it'd be a significant difference in cost in changing bases. It's probably very little difference in price if they're outsourced and it probably doesn't save them a whole lot in the packaging stage, maybe a few dollars over thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars worth of kits.
But their profit % went down, so something has cost them a lot more to do. Lower ROI on new AoS kits? More store overheads?
They have a breakdown in their report if you read through. I'm doing this maths in my head so sorry if I make a mistake
Trade: Went up 950k, probably due to the distribution restructuring they talked about elsewhere in the report. Retail: Went up approx 2M, 1.8M of which went in to opening 48 new stores and refurbishing 20 of them. Mail Order: Went up approx 870k, these are apparently the start of changes which will be implemented next year. Tooling: They invested 2.6M in tooling, milling and injection moulding machines.
"Product and supply" went down 350k, "central costs" down 420k, "service centre" costs down 300k.
So it seems most of the money went in to beefing up their retail stores, trade distribution, new tooling and changes to mail order.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/08/02 08:57:55
frozenwastes wrote: There is one thing that is very different about this annual report compared to those from the Kirby years.
They are investing more capital in the business. Their revenue and profit are mostly flat, but their return on capital is down because they are actually investing it back in the business.
And their dividend payment was relatively sane and might actually be sustainable. Unlike Kirby's looting of the company savings to pay more in dividends in a year than the company took in.
It looks like GW might be able to find the right combination of store locations and sales people to make their products work at a very high price. I've been of the opinion for quite some time that Forge World and Australia show what people can be willing to pay. They just need to find the subset of their potential customers who will pay it. It looks like they are at least partially succeeding at it.
Still no real plan to return to growth though. Just more treading water. We won't see if the increased deployment of capital will bear any fruit for a year or more, but it certainly can't bear less fruit than the nothing they were doing under Kirby. They actually have a person who's the head of marketing now. What a crazy idea.
Kirby is the majority shareholder he was paying himself near a million with each dividend payed, add on the stupid money he paid his wife for web design it's clear he was just padding his own wallet.
There no doubt this is a good screw, on top of his pay too, but to say he was the majority shareholder and forced the company to pay out dividends surely for his own benefit is wrong.
frozenwastes wrote: There is one thing that is very different about this annual report compared to those from the Kirby years.
They are investing more capital in the business. Their revenue and profit are mostly flat, but their return on capital is down because they are actually investing it back in the business.
And their dividend payment was relatively sane and might actually be sustainable. Unlike Kirby's looting of the company savings to pay more in dividends in a year than the company took in.
It looks like GW might be able to find the right combination of store locations and sales people to make their products work at a very high price. I've been of the opinion for quite some time that Forge World and Australia show what people can be willing to pay. They just need to find the subset of their potential customers who will pay it. It looks like they are at least partially succeeding at it.
Still no real plan to return to growth though. Just more treading water. We won't see if the increased deployment of capital will bear any fruit for a year or more, but it certainly can't bear less fruit than the nothing they were doing under Kirby. They actually have a person who's the head of marketing now. What a crazy idea.
Kirby is the majority shareholder he was paying himself near a million with each dividend payed, add on the stupid money he paid his wife for web design it's clear he was just padding his own wallet.
In Kirbys defence, it was about a million a year, not a million a dividend payment.
hobojebus wrote: Fine but no one's defending 4 mil for a site that at most should of cost 400k according to people who actually work in the industry.
Also wasn't there a 52p divided played out recently.
Shoulda woulda coulda, people say a lot of things when they dont have all the facts, plenty of companies pay over the odds for all sorts of services they know little about, not just GW.
There no doubt this is a good screw, on top of his pay too, but to say he was the majority shareholder and forced the company to pay out dividends surely for his own benefit is wrong.
The year total was 52p dividends, so Kirby made £1,109,776.
Whether he deliberately screwed the company to make share money I don't know, but GW has handed out more in dividends than it's made more than once, and he referred to GW as a cash generating machine (I think) in one of the reports.
hobojebus wrote: Fine but no one's defending 4 mil for a site that at most should of cost 400k according to people who actually work in the industry.
Also wasn't there a 52p divided played out recently.
Shoulda woulda coulda, people say a lot of things when they dont have all the facts, plenty of companies pay over the odds for all sorts of services they know little about, not just GW.
True, but you'd expect a progessional company to try and figure out if it was a fair price. Maybe they did, but since Kirbys wife was responsible for it, with no IT background, it doens't look good (plus I think she was paid about £100k for the consultancy)
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/08/02 10:37:21
Yes, it was 52p per share in total in 2015. However all the shareholders got that, not just Kirby, so 93% of the cash went to other people.
The involvement of Kirby's wife in the web site redesign does not look good, especially as only two or three years later they are now starting to redesign it again.
But for most of its history, GW has been a cash generating machine. It is a company whose profits are largely made of actual cash spent by customers, not only-on-paper increases in capital or debts, and so on. If the company makes a good profit after investing in machinery and so on, it's only right for some of that money to be paid in dividends.
They shut down the nice little consultancy earners he and his wife were on and just adjusted his fixed fee.
Ex-Mantic Rules Committees: Kings of War, Warpath
"The Emperor is obviously not a dictator, he's a couch." Starbuck: "Why can't we use the starboard launch bays?"
Engineer: "Because it's a gift shop!"
Kilkrazy wrote: Yes, it was 52p per share in total in 2015. However all the shareholders got that, not just Kirby, so 93% of the cash went to other people.
Indeed, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the key (and only?) decision maker made £1.1 million from the stock dividend. That's quite a lot of incentive to push for dividend over everything else (after tax it's still like £550k)
But for most of its history, GW has been a cash generating machine. It is a company whose profits are largely made of actual cash spent by customers, not only-on-paper increases in capital or debts, and so on. If the company makes a good profit after investing in machinery and so on, it's only right for some of that money to be paid in dividends.
Indeed it is only right that any truly surplus cash is paid out as dividends, but I'm suspicious that GW can find so little to invest money in, and especially suspicious of the years where the dividend was larger than the earnings per share, so they had to borrow / lose capital on the dividend. It's maybe worth doing once or twice to shore the share price up, but it strikes me as a desperate move.
It's very sketchy and way out of line in terms of proven sustainable dividend strategies. It's a very good thing that GW has stopped paying out more than they are earning and actually deploying capital back into the business.
It's actually impressive that they were able to open so many new stores and in less than a year they're only losing such a tiny amount of money. Usually businesses take a while to build up their customer base. I expect by the half year report those locations will become profit making and GW's core business revenue may actually increase for a change.
Balance in pick up games? Two people, each with their own goals for the game, design half a board game on their own without knowing the layout of the board and hope it all works out. Good luck with that. The faster you can find like minded individuals who want the same things from the game as you, the better.
They are investing more capital in the business. Their revenue and profit are mostly flat, but their return on capital is down because they are actually investing it back in the business.
Where are you getting that from, relatively speaking? Their operating expenses are up 2.5 million (small and primarily driven by store openings, purchase of equipment is down 1,487,000 year-on-year and product development costs are relatively flat (about 1,000 pounds less than last year). Sure, inventories are up but that includes unsold stock so not really anything to crow about.
If you considering reinvesting in the business, opening loss-leading stores, sure I'll grant you a difference of opinion but I call that doubling down on a stupid strategy.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
hobojebus wrote: Fine but no one's defending 4 mil for a site that at most should of cost 400k according to people who actually work in the industry.
Also wasn't there a 52p divided played out recently.
Not to mention they hired Kirby's wife as a contractor to run the website development; someone whose CV includes being the secretary for Kirby's tax-shelter, ghost business and organizing sports at the local club for kids. I know I shouldn't be concerned with that obvious sterling background in IT, but I'm just picky that way.
Edit:
Was looking at wrong entries so changed some stuff.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/08/02 15:59:52
Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do
agnosto wrote: If you considering reinvesting in the business, opening loss-leading stores, sure I'll grant you a difference of opinion but I call that doubling down on a stupid strategy.
So from the report: We opened 48 new stores in the year including 7 relocated stores. These new stores generated £2.1million of sales and made a loss of £0.1 million.
My take: Opening a new store has the highest up front cost for the location. They have to recruit staff, set up displays, find a location and put in a ton of wages, transport of product and merchandising costs and their 48 stores still barely lost any money.
Report: Due to the under performance of some of our new stores in Continental Europe, we have paused any new store openings in this territory for 2016/17. Our main focus for store openings will be North America. This will allow us to focus on improving our existing store performance.
My take: It's also not that each store is coming up short one 48th of £100,000. Some stores (North America) are doing fine and others are losing money (Europe) with an average of a loss of £100,000 across all 48 stores. So from here all they have to do is stop doing what is not working (opening stores in Europe) and do more of what is (opening stores in North America). Since the economic crisis of 2009, the US has had the best recovery in the world. It is the smart place to open new stores.
Report: Retail sales fell by 1.3 % in the year (-0.4% at constant currency). Our underlying performance was -4.4%, which was mostly offset by the contribution from 33 net new stores and our new visitor centre delivering 100% growth.
Not great, but what they are doing now is working. The new stores are contributing towards a reversal of their retail trend and the revamp of their visitor centre is working. This isn't good news that their sales declined. I just think this new CEO actually has identified the problem instead of just blustering about how the miniatures are jewel like objects of magic and wonder and blaming legal systems meant to deal with the theft of pigs or any of the other crazy crap Kirby was on about.
Our underlying performance in our own stores to January 2016 wasn’t good enough. I made some changes in our in-country retail support structure to address the decline. Our flat management structure did not support the complexity of managing 149 stores across 14 countries in Continental Europe.
This is a direct reversal of Kirby's restructuring. Kirby flattened the management structure across the world so there was basically one guy between the board of directors and a given retail store for each region. Remeber the closing of GW Germany? This is Rountree acknowledging they went too far and is actually reversing some of Kirby's decisions.
The underlying performance in their own stores wasn't good enough. I think it's poised for improvement though as they have correctly identified where stores are losing money and where stores are making money. And now they have a better support structure in Europe to make sure the 149 stores in 14 countries don't have their issues misunderstood because of ignorance of local factors that can only be the result of a flat management system across multiple countries.
In January 2016 we moved to a country based solution. We now have four territory managers; Germany/Scandinavia, Netherlands, France and Spain/Italy. We are also piloting five training stores in North America. These training stores are run as profitable stores. To reduce travel time and cost we now send our new recruits for their initial training to one of these stores. We are launching a new skills based training programme at our August 2016 global retail workshops
Identifying what works and sending people to those stores to be trained to do those things makes sense. As does concentrating on skills based training rather than some sort of dumb Kirby-esque idea that conformity and attitude are all that matters is definitely a step in the right direction.
Mark Wells cut costs and successfully turned GW back to profitability after their loss making year. Kirby then took Well's cost cutting approach and scorched the earth. He did everything he could to cut costs and to improve margins to generate as much cash as possible for one last hurrah of looting through an unsustainable dividend ratio before retiring. Now it's up to Rountree to reverse Kirby's strip mining of GW to fill his own pockets. It's not going to be an immediate reversal. I think they're being far more intentional about their stores and the next report will show this change (which happened in January 2016) paying off.
Automatically Appended Next Post: This however, should be extremely troubling to GW:
Mail order Sales fell by 1.8% (-1.6% at constant currency). Sales of our Forge World range grew by 28% offset by a 12% decline in our Citadel range.
If they can't identify why Forge World is cannibalizing their citadel sales or identify what it is about Forge World people like and make their citadel range more like that, or identify what people were liking about the citadel range and the product no longer offers it, they will be in for a world of hurt.
This is one area where they need to do some customer experience research. And not customer experience of the sales process. But of the product. They need a better understanding of why these spikes in Forge World and drops in Citadel are happening. And fast. If this trend in Citadel (their core product) continues, then any gains made in the retail sector through opening stores in profitable locations and supporting the European stores to move to profitability will be cancelled out by plunging online sales of their plastic miniatures.
This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2016/08/02 17:50:10
Balance in pick up games? Two people, each with their own goals for the game, design half a board game on their own without knowing the layout of the board and hope it all works out. Good luck with that. The faster you can find like minded individuals who want the same things from the game as you, the better.
agnosto wrote: If you considering reinvesting in the business, opening loss-leading stores, sure I'll grant you a difference of opinion but I call that doubling down on a stupid strategy.
So from the report: We opened 48 new stores in the year including 7 relocated stores. These new stores generated £2.1million of sales and made a loss of £0.1 million.
My take: Opening a new store has the highest up front cost for the location. They have to recruit staff, set up displays, find a location and put in a ton of wages, transport of product and merchandising costs and their 48 stores still barely lost any money.
Report: Due to the under performance of some of our new stores in Continental Europe, we have paused any new store openings in this territory for 2016/17. Our main focus for store openings will be North America. This will allow us to focus on improving our existing store performance.
My take: It's also not that each store is coming up short one 48th of £100,000. Some stores (North America) are doing fine and others are losing money (Europe) with an average of a loss of £100,000 across all 48 stores. So from here all they have to do is stop doing what is not working (opening stores in Europe) and do more of what is (opening stores in North America). Since the economic crisis of 2009, the US has had the best recovery in the world. It is the smart place to open new stores.
Report: Retail sales fell by 1.3 % in the year (-0.4% at constant currency). Our underlying performance was -4.4%, which was mostly offset by the contribution from 33 net new stores and our new visitor centre delivering 100% growth.
Not great, but what they are doing now is working. The new stores are contributing towards a reversal of their retail trend and the revamp of their visitor centre is working. This isn't good news that their sales declined. I just think this new CEO actually has identified the problem instead of just blustering about how the miniatures are jewel like objects of magic and wonder and blaming legal systems meant to deal with the theft of pigs or any of the other crazy crap Kirby was on about.
Our underlying performance in our own stores to January 2016 wasn’t good enough. I made some changes in our in-country retail support structure to address the decline. Our flat management structure did not support the complexity of managing 149 stores across 14 countries in Continental Europe.
This is a direct reversal of Kirby's restructuring. Kirby flattened the management structure across the world so there was basically one guy between the board of directors and a given retail store for each region. Remeber the closing of GW Germany? This is Rountree acknowledging they went too far and is actually reversing some of Kirby's decisions.
The underlying performance in their own stores wasn't good enough. I think it's poised for improvement though as they have correctly identified where stores are losing money and where stores are making money. And now they have a better support structure in Europe to make sure the 149 stores in 14 countries don't have their issues misunderstood because of ignorance of local factors that can only be the result of a flat management system across multiple countries.
In January 2016 we moved to a country based solution. We now have four territory managers; Germany/Scandinavia, Netherlands, France and Spain/Italy. We are also piloting five training stores in North America. These training stores are run as profitable stores. To reduce travel time and cost we now send our new recruits for their initial training to one of these stores. We are launching a new skills based training programme at our August 2016 global retail workshops
Identifying what works and sending people to those stores to be trained to do those things makes sense. As does concentrating on skills based training rather than some sort of dumb Kirby-esque idea that conformity and attitude are all that matters is definitely a step in the right direction.
Mark Wells cut costs and successfully turned GW back to profitability after their loss making year. Kirby then took Well's cost cutting approach and scorched the earth. He did everything he could to cut costs and to improve margins to generate as much cash as possible for one last hurrah of looting through an unsustainable dividend ratio before retiring. Now it's up to Rountree to reverse Kirby's strip mining of GW to fill his own pockets. It's not going to be an immediate reversal. I think they're being far more intentional about their stores and the next report will show this change (which happened in January 2016) paying off.
Automatically Appended Next Post: This however, should be extremely troubling to GW:
Mail order Sales fell by 1.8% (-1.6% at constant currency). Sales of our Forge World range grew by 28% offset by a 12% decline in our Citadel range.
If they can't identify why Forge World is cannibalizing their citadel sales or identify what it is about Forge World people like and make their citadel range more like that, or identify what people were liking about the citadel range and the product no longer offers it, they will be in for a world of hurt.
This is one area where they need to do some customer experience research. And not customer experience of the sales process. But of the product. They need a better understanding of why these spikes in Forge World and drops in Citadel are happening. And fast. If this trend in Citadel (their core product) continues, then any gains made in the retail sector through opening stores in profitable locations and supporting the European stores to move to profitability will be cancelled out by plunging online sales of their plastic miniatures.
There's a lot of good stuff in your post, things that I have noted in past threads as well. I'll readily admit that when I read earnings reports, I tend to look at hard numbers rather than executive-speak for why they think things are happening; I like to draw my own conclusions and it's saved me some money in the past by helping to drop stock without being convinced that a stinky stock wasn't stinky through creative wordsmithing.
That said, I still think that opening new stores is a costly, losing endeavor, no matter where they are opened. Loss producing stores cost them 562,000 pounds in FY16 compared to 236,000 in FY15, more than double; that's troubling. As old as this company is, they shouldn't be pursuing a shotgun approach to opening stores; whoever is placing these stores needs to be shown the door.
Let's look at this another way. You mentioned N.America being a hotbed of growth. While their retail sales in NA have grown 611,000, NA is still 3rd place in retail sales but 1st in Trade. Yes, yes, I know what ewas said in the report but the numbers tell a deeper story than depending upon what someone interprets as a "loss".
Bottom line. It costs 35,930,000 in operating expenses for retail stores versus 8,899,000 in trade and 5,002,000 in mail-order. Conversely, operating profit from each segment was -3,410,000 and +10,625,000, and +13,747 respectively. Retail stores cost them 3.4 million, more than double the previous year!, to operate last fiscal year while their other sales channels all made money. That should tell us something.
Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do
agnosto wrote: I'll readily admit that when I read earnings reports, I tend to look at hard numbers rather than executive-speak for why they think things are happening; I like to draw my own conclusions and it's saved me some money in the past by helping to drop stock without being convinced that a stinky stock wasn't stinky through creative wordsmithing.
It seems this time there's more useful information in the text compared to when Kirby was in charge. Aside from some less useful information, it does hint at how they are starting to acknowledge problems and address them instead of acting like they can do no wrong and there's also some interesting numbers in the text portion that aren't covered in the numerical summaries (things like new releases accounting for 30% of their sales, or FW growing by 28% and Citadel dropping by 12% and some other interesting stuff).
I hadn't actually considered Citadel dropping by 12%, that actually paints a much poorer picture of AoS because it's not like they managed to maintain sales with AoS, they actually lost quite considerable sales and FW picked up the slack.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/08/02 20:39:16
It is the shops which are Games Workshop's main means of marketing and promoting Teh HHHobby. That's why GW are prepared to spend so much on their retail network when from an accounting angle, the web and indy shops look much more successful.
hobojebus wrote: Given the change of statue and facings I think they expected it to explode right out the gate.
Obviously a spectacular failure of foresight due to total ignorance of what their customers actually wanted.
And the haters expected it to be an epic failure. So much for that too.
Citation needed. We've nothing but a spurious statement, whose accuracy has already been thoroughly deconstructed as being vague and spurious, outlining the performance of AOS, in a document that by its very nature would never admit to failure in overt terms.
It could very well have been an epic failure by GW's hopes/projections, there simply isn't the evidence to refute that.
It is reasonable, given the actions around the games launch and lengthy period devoted to a majority of AOS releases to assume that GW has/had high hopes for the game however.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/08/02 21:07:42
We find comfort among those who agree with us - growth among those who don't. - Frank Howard Clark
The wise man doubts often, and changes his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubts not; he knows all things but his own ignorance.
The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!” Professor Brian Cox
hobojebus wrote: Given the change of statue and facings I think they expected it to explode right out the gate.
Obviously a spectacular failure of foresight due to total ignorance of what their customers actually wanted.
And the haters expected it to be an epic failure. So much for that too.
Speaking as one of the haters - no, most of us were not saying that.
Most of us have been predicting that if GW did not start making some fairly massive changes that the company would be in a state of slow decline until a critical point was reached, and then collapse. With the time involved being around six to ten years.
GW is starting to make some changes, but is still losing market share - the slow decline is still happening, but is starting to show some signs of being turned around.
I support many of these changes - the getting started bundles are something that should have been done a decade ago - I like the idea.
But right now, GW doesn't have anything that I much want.
The Auld Grump - at this point if they had a Getting Started bundle for Tomb Kings... I would be a happy Grump.
Kilkrazy wrote:When I was a young boy all my wargames were narratively based because I played with my toy soldiers and vehicles without the use of any rules.
The reason I bought rules and became a real wargamer was because I wanted a properly thought out structure to govern the action instead of just making things up as I went along.
40K needs rebuilt. 20 years of string and sellotape inexpertly applied to a ruleset designed for a different ethos (which was itself hammered out of the broken bones of a RPG) has created a legendary mess of rules bloat, player confusion, power creep and more than a little fluff mutilation (Khorne sorcerers, really?).
However to fix it GW will need to address, amongst other things, the explosion in the use of giant models. As there was a giant model explosion that suggests that they are particularly profitable so probably won't be touched.
I would love to see 40K split into a small scale skirmish game like it used to be and the big stompy robot game it is now.
40K needs rebuilt. 20 years of string and sellotape inexpertly applied to a ruleset designed for a different ethos (which was itself hammered out of the broken bones of a RPG) has created a legendary mess of rules bloat, player confusion, power creep and more than a little fluff mutilation (Khorne sorcerers, really?).
However to fix it GW will need to address, amongst other things, the explosion in the use of giant models. As there was a giant model explosion that suggests that they are particularly profitable so probably won't be touched.
I would love to see 40K split into a small scale skirmish game like it used to be and the big stompy robot game it is now.
I don't think GW wants to "fix" 40k. It still does exactly what they want it to do, which is sell models. And the big models are still selling, so they've got no real reason to change at this point. Until the sales stink as a result of their current path (similar to what happened in 8th edition when army size skyrocketed), I don't think they'll see a reason to change.
They've tried making some board games, and all that's done is show they don't have the in-house ability to make board games people want to play. Pretty much the only people who buy them are current customers who see the models as a good deal, or collectible for their uniqueness.
In my opinion they need to 1) get some new talent in (or outsource), and 2) get away from the "assembly required" for their board games, and go to straight already cut out miniatures in a box, similar to other board games. For their price point, they damn well ought to be painted as well in my opinion. X-Wing and a few similar games have shown what's achievable when you outsource model painting to dirt poor third world countries, and its going to be requisite for more market growth. While I personally I still enjoy that aspect of the hobby, but a lot of people don't, and GW is losing out on money from all the people that love X-Wing and the other similar product's ready to go nature.
If they sold fully assembled 5 color space marines, I bet they'd sell like hot cakes.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/08/03 00:02:33
There's a lot of good stuff in your post, things that I have noted in past threads as well. I'll readily admit that when I read earnings reports, I tend to look at hard numbers rather than executive-speak for why they think things are happening; I like to draw my own conclusions and it's saved me some money in the past by helping to drop stock without being convinced that a stinky stock wasn't stinky through creative wordsmithing.
I wouldn't invest in GW at this point. Even if it does end up going up in the future, the risk is just too high compared to the possible reward.
Bottom line. It costs 35,930,000 in operating expenses for retail stores versus 8,899,000 in trade and 5,002,000 in mail-order. Conversely, operating profit from each segment was -3,410,000 and +10,625,000, and +13,747 respectively. Retail stores cost them 3.4 million, more than double the previous year!, to operate last fiscal year while their other sales channels all made money. That should tell us something.
It's actually kind of funny that their trade sales are the most efficient means of making money but they seem committed to getting as much direct sales as possible.
I think the industry as a whole is better the more irrelevant GW is, so I'm hoping that I'm wrong and that the stores don't become profitable and GW can continue its slow decline.
I don't think GW wants to "fix" 40k. It still does exactly what they want it to do, which is sell models. And the big models are still selling, so they've got no real reason to change at this point. Until the sales stink as a result of their current path (similar to what happened in 8th edition when army size skyrocketed), I don't think they'll see a reason to change.
They'll do it if they think a new they can market a new version as a product. The old new edition cash injection.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/08/03 00:34:57
Balance in pick up games? Two people, each with their own goals for the game, design half a board game on their own without knowing the layout of the board and hope it all works out. Good luck with that. The faster you can find like minded individuals who want the same things from the game as you, the better.
40K needs rebuilt. 20 years of string and sellotape inexpertly applied to a ruleset designed for a different ethos (which was itself hammered out of the broken bones of a RPG) has created a legendary mess of rules bloat, player confusion, power creep and more than a little fluff mutilation (Khorne sorcerers, really?).
However to fix it GW will need to address, amongst other things, the explosion in the use of giant models. As there was a giant model explosion that suggests that they are particularly profitable so probably won't be touched.
I would love to see 40K split into a small scale skirmish game like it used to be and the big stompy robot game it is now.
It doesn't need a rebuilt, just streamlining and balancing, They should go back to what they had in the past, standard rules and advanced rules. We will see with the 8th which way they will go, but i don't think they will change the basic system much.
Agnosto, the more I read the report, the more I'm coming around to your way of thinking on this. While I still think a good portion of the new stores will become profitable, it seems like a good bet that the existing stores are going to decline in profitability at an even faster rate.
I wonder if there's a saturation point. GW sets up a store and maybe 2-5 years later everyone in that particular neighbourhood who is interested in the sort of thing GW sells has checked it out and either bought or not and there's not much more in the way of people to reach. And if in that time a critical mass of customers hasn't formed to drive sales by word of mouth (which GW still relies on to a huge degree) the sales flat line and drop off.
Balance in pick up games? Two people, each with their own goals for the game, design half a board game on their own without knowing the layout of the board and hope it all works out. Good luck with that. The faster you can find like minded individuals who want the same things from the game as you, the better.
I don't think GW wants to "fix" 40k. It still does exactly what they want it to do, which is sell models. And the big models are still selling, so they've got no real reason to change at this point.
Sale are down yet again. 40k obviously isn't selling like it used to and given that 40k is what keeps GW alive this is something that they will need to address.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/08/03 06:47:17
