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Original title "Games Workshop, so close to bankruptcy again..."


... but not according to this report

Via https://investor.games-workshop.com/

https://19485-presscdn-0-14-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2016-17-Press-statement.pdf

Looks good



Also

Games Workshop profits will 'exceed market expectations'

By Robert Hutchins

JULY 25TH 2017 AT 11:35AM
UPDATED JULY 25TH 2017 AT 12:07PM


In a trading update for May 29th to July 23rd 2017, the business said its ‘good performance in 2016/17 has continued strongly in to 2017/18.’

“Sales and profits for 2017/18 to date are well above the same period in the prior year,” said the firm.

“Profits for 2017/18 are therefore likely to be above market expectations.”

Despite the uplift, Games Workshop said the board remains aware of potential uncertainty in the market.

The company has also announced that Tom Kirby will retire from the board and will not seek re-election as a director. He will step down at the Games Workshop annual general meeting in September.

Nick Donaldson will succeed Kirby on his retirement.

http://www.toynews-online.biz/news/read/games-workshop-profits-will-exceed-market-expectations/049014



* Disclaimer: The thread title may contain signs of click-baitery, alarmism and hyperbole *

This looks promising.

Also, fantastic job on the thread title!

Oh you.

thats good news though.

Who are the people?

And are the sales up because of 8th edition? Give us some context.

Who's Nick Donaldson?

Anyway, it's absolutely shocking news that a company that is releasing lots of stuff that lots of people want to buy lots of is doing well financially.

Revenue is 40 million pounds more than last year

There cant be a GW financial thread without the sky is falling. So I had to put it into the title.

Looks good, really good actually, seems the internal changes paid off

 Niiai wrote:
Who are the people?

And are the sales up because of 8th edition? Give us some context.

Or you could read the document? I appreciate not everyone has the academic or real life experience to understand every nuance, heck, I don't understand every single element and I've both studied business and run my own, but a simple glance at the document to see the dates included in the report would answer the question as to whether 8th was included in them is something any layperson could do, and by people doing their best to keep elementary questions to the minimum by educating themselves, we keep the thread cleaner and more focused, so everyone wins.

 Niiai wrote:
Who are the people?

And are the sales up because of 8th edition? Give us some context.

Nah. These figures will have cut off some weeks ago. Certainly before 8th Ed went up for pre-order.

Remember a couple of things..
The boxed games (including the insanely popular Shadow..uh.. thingy.. ), Skirmish, and apparently something fixed AoS and people started liking it (at least that's what I'm told). Plus the nice 40k kits that were being released. Shadow War probably did a fair bit for this as everyone was hocking it for a gajillion dollars and it got people excited about "old GW" again.

I hope GW puts 2+2 together on this and doesn't just decide that they're "out of the danger" and decide to go back to old habits (the bad ones).

So the good old Kirby has reach a end in GW! What a surprise.

Damm you GW, those shares at 1400 Pounds a piece... if only I had invested in them 2 years ago...

 MLaw wrote:


I hope GW puts 2+2 together on this and doesn't just decide that they're "out of the danger" and decide to go back to old habits (the bad ones).

I'd suggest that bad old habits were attributable to bad old personas, personas that aren't there any more...

I think current ventures into friendly, interactive and open attitudes and 'giving em what they want' are proving very profitable. Companies are in the habit of enjoy profits and wanting more of them, so let's assume GW is going to continue on a much stronger, more positive pathway from now on. At least in the foreseeable.

Kirby no longer director and even off the board - thank goodness! Can't hide that the GW turn around in performance came almost directly as a result of him no longer steering the ship.

Note I'm not commenting on their game-related choices - but the financial results have been really clear since Kirby lost power.

That was by far the best news today from GW. To heck with the insane growth over last year and an actual return to increased volume. Kirby is gone!!!!!

GW's stock started skyrocketing mid-2016 when the effects of starting to engage with the community 6 months earlier began to kick in, so this comes as no surprise.

I'd suggest a word of caution here. The six monthly report showed that on a like for like basis before currency fluctuations that they only had modest growth (it was circa 7% IIRC) and still failed to recoup the loss in unit sales it experienced in the previous year. The largest boost to the 6 month sales and profits came from the collapse if the £ and them keeping all foreign prices the same. It effectively boosted their sales by value and profit by a significant margin (and wasn't something that could have been predicted at the last full year financial report).

This is likely why the board is expressing caution. They are probably indicating that things aren't likely to grow quite like this again because the £ has stabilised (at least until we leave the EU anyway) and hence they will be back to normal trading conditions (indicating that sales and profit growth might significantly slow down in the next year). They might also be looking at the risk the UK might stay in the EU. That might see a huge rebound in the £ which would massively suck profits down again. This in no way means they were anywhere near going bust, but these figures aren't also likely to mean that GW have recovered by unit sales on from a few years ago.

Not sure 7% growth can be considered modest. Especially not when you're the market leader?

We can only extrapolate from other, completely different markets, given other than FFG's parent company, nobody else in the industry is a PLC, thus don't have to publish their figures.

Good to see them growing again, but how much is down to an increase in sales volume, and how much is to do with the pound tanking so all their overseas sales are suddenly making them more money?

Generally GW have made some good moves over the last 2 years. Getting started sets, the hours heresy boxed game and shadow wars all seem to have sold like hot cakes. It will be interesting to see if sales continue to grow now the buzz about 8th edition has died away.

 Whirlwind wrote:
I'd suggest a word of caution here. The six monthly report showed that on a like for like basis before currency fluctuations that they only had modest growth (it was circa 7% IIRC) and still failed to recoup the loss in unit sales it experienced in the previous year. The largest boost to the 6 month sales and profits came from the collapse if the £ and them keeping all foreign prices the same. It effectively boosted their sales by value and profit by a significant margin (and wasn't something that could have been predicted at the last full year financial report).

This is likely why the board is expressing caution. They are probably indicating that things aren't likely to grow quite like this again because the £ has stabilised (at least until we leave the EU anyway) and hence they will be back to normal trading conditions (indicating that sales and profit growth might significantly slow down in the next year). They might also be looking at the risk the UK might stay in the EU. That might see a huge rebound in the £ which would massively suck profits down again. This in no way means they were anywhere near going bust, but these figures aren't also likely to mean that GW have recovered by unit sales on from a few years ago.

If you check against North American Trade (independent retail) it grew 39% while the pound shrunk 15%. That is still translates into nearly 19% growth for trade in the US. That shows considerable growth from independent retailers and that these numbers are not just currency tricks.

Curious to see what ICV2's numbers for the industry since it always follows shortly after GW releases it's numbers.

I haven't looked at the figures, but you do need to bear in mind that GW gets 2/3rds of its sales from outside the UK, and the GBP declined significantly after the Brexit vote a year ago. While GW report according to some concept of constant currency, this forex change undoubtedly will have helped.

All that being said, GW have done a lot of good stuff since Kriby left and I believe they are reaping the rewards. It's not simply financial malarkey.

£118m-£143m at constant currency. Still not too shabby.

Warhams-77 wrote:


Revenue is 40 million pounds more than last year

There cant be a GW financial thread without the sky is falling. So I had to put it into the title.

To give some credit to the people who participated in the previous financial threads, it's just not true. The last person who actually advocated for an immediate threat to GW was Wayshuba and he was like a lone voice in the wilderness. Everyone else was like "GW is going to eventually have to change how they do things, but they're not going anywhere any time soon."

Even during the last time that GW lost money people were like "there's more room to cut costs and they can borrow millions and millions to cover any changes they might need to make if they continue to lose money." Wayshuba was the only one claiming they were on a death spiral caused by their pricing policy. I maintain that they can keep a profitable business going even if they take GW Australia/Forge World prices and apply that everywhere.

This notion that DakkaDakka GW financial threads are full of people who think GW is going to blow up at any moment hasn't been true since the popping of the LOTR bubble. The threads have continually been about how GW can't stay on that path forever and eventually they'll need to change. They'll hit a point where all costs have been cut and they need to do something differently other than cut costs, raise prices and switch stores to one employee operations.

And they have. It took a change in company leadership. But they've done it. They've finally embraced the internet, reduced barriers to entry, offered value, made rules that actually make their models feel more valuable rather than less. Are trying to get back lapsed customers.

My absolute favorite thing about the latest financial report is that Rountree connects the improvement of margins with volume of sales. Kirby was on this plan of reducing volume as a means of increasing margins which is actually not taking advantage of the economics of injection moulded plastic production making the next sprue you produce cost less and less on average the more you make. Rountree listing volume as the cause of increased margins shows a major, major shift in GW's thinking about business.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
If the moderators decide *this* is going to be the financial thread and the other longer one will be closed, then the click bait title probably should be edited.

Frozenwastes, Dakka's GW financial threads have been great. I was joking about the ever-occuring GW is driving it against the wall-posts and want people to read the report and find out themselves what is going on. I have read Reinholt's and a lot of other people's analysis with interest (was that on Warseer?) in the past, and followed some discussions especially on the Chapterhouse case closely. If the thread title is not allowing a serious discussion I can change it accordingly. No problem


Automatically Appended Next Post:
We can also close this and continue the original one. I'm totally fine with that

I enjoyed the humor of the title, so good job from my point.

Never can have enough "take thats" at the ragers.

Title updated

I love how in the pre-amble Kirby basically praises all the things that he refused to do and say it was the source of all this wonderful growth.

But good for them. Wish I had some stock with them, but still good for them.

With regard to the UK's colossal act of self-harm and constant currency?

Sales up 21%. At constant currency.

Remember. These reports are independently verified as well.

21%. Up.

21%.

Warhams-77 wrote:
Frozenwastes, Dakka's GW financial threads have been great. I was joking about the ever-occuring GW is driving it against the wall-posts and want people to read the report and find out themselves what is going on. I have read Reinholt's and a lot of other people's analysis with interest (was that on Warseer?) in the past, and followed some discussions especially on the Chapterhouse case closely. If the thread title is not allowing a serious discussion I can change it accordingly. No problem.

It's cool, but I do remember, with some regularity people would pop into the thread and in the middle of a discussion about actual numbers and their implications basically go "you guys have been predicting GW's demise for decades and they are still here! You're all dumb!" (or something like that) and we'd all look around and go "who is doing that?" So the thread title struck me as more of the same.

Even during the most negative threads on here (and on warseer to a lesser extent) people were still saying that GW could probably survive a decade or more losing money as they had great access to debt and more than enough time to change direction if things got that bad. The reality was that GW (especially under Mark Wells) was more than willing to make massive changes incredibly rapidly and didn't need to take that long to fix things.

There will be less to talk about when things are so obviously positive as there isn't much room for people to offer their solutions when there aren't any real problems. My hope is that Rountree and those he directly works with to make decisions take this success as confirmation that the things they changed matter. That there is a better approach than maximum cash extraction before a new customer quits.

Given that Rountree has stated that getting back lapsed customers is a priority in both this report and previous ones, I think he knows that Kirby's approach was inferior to his own. And now he has concrete results to prove it. The next thing I want him to be convinced of to the point he feels it is important enough to mention is that the game experience matters. That the rules can and do drive miniatures sales and do this best when they add value to the models rather than subtract value by reducing their impact on a single game so you need more and thus have to buy more. That the rules can be both a marketing idea and an actual part of the customer experience. They can make the models feel more awesome rather than less.

I'm already confident that those who bought into GW's stock when the leadership changed will continue to be amply, amply rewarded.

I am so glad that I was wrong when I predicted that Kirby's likely successor would be another yes-man with no plan of his own.

And to be fair about the yes man thing Frozenwastes the last one was so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility we got another yes man. I'm just glad they finally managed to put someone in the drivers seat, either by accident or design, who had the ability to remove the roadblocks gw had been operating under (that were possible) and start to turn the ship. 2 years into his tenure and we're looking at a return to volume growth. That's significant.

The reverse being that so many of the issues that were holding GW back were so mind f**kingly obvious and easy to address for a solvent company that while Rountree deserves the credit for getting in and doing it, we shouldn't get too carried away with his abilities as anything more than competent unless/until something a little more challenging than "stop alienating your customers and pricing potential new blood out of the equation" crosses his path.

Excellent progress, no doubt, but much of the low hanging fruit has now been harvested, maintaining this level of performance will be a real challenge.

 Hulksmash wrote:
That was by far the best news today from GW. To heck with the insane growth over last year and an actual return to increased volume. Kirby is gone!!!!!

Of course the items are not entirely unrelated....