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Seeing how Disney bought Lukasarts and right to make Star Wars I wonder if the same thing can happened to Games Workshop.
How much do you think this is possible and how much would Games Workshop worth?

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
Seeing how Disney bought Lukasarts and right to make Star Wars I wonder if the same thing can happened to Games Workshop.
How much do you think this is possible and how much would Games Workshop worth?

Tens of- No! Hundreds of dollars.

It's floated on the London Stock Exchange and is currently worth 213 million pounds, market cap.

Probably not lucrative enough for a major name like Disney to bother with.

0_0

Games Workshop is only worth around 300 million Euros?

Yes. Just a measly 300million Euros Alexander. About a sixteenth of what Lucasarts is getting bought for. Bloody vagrants.

God Emperor....
After this much miniatures and novels I though that they will be worth much more.

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
God Emperor....
After this much miniatures and novels I though that they will be worth much more.

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. Doesn't mean someone else won't ever buy them. I remember when Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast.

Don't think it's bad.

They are 1/16 of what Disney paid for Lucas Arts. They probably sold far, far less miniatures, books, toys than 1/16 of the mountain of stuff sold under the Star Wars brand.

I just hope that Matt Ward will not buy them...

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
I just hope that Matt Ward will not buy them...

Well, stop and consider the odds of that.

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
I just hope that Matt Ward will not buy them...

Me too. GW loosing its best creative to management would be a severe blow. What'd be left? Phil 'Long Spam' Kelly and Robin 'Pyrovore' Cruddace? GW'd be finished.

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
Seeing how Disney bought Lukasarts and right to make Star Wars

Wait, what? When the hell did this happen?

It only happened today hahahahaha

 Griddlelol wrote:

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
Seeing how Disney bought Lukasarts and right to make Star Wars

Wait, what? When the hell did this happen?

Two whole hours ago. At least, it was announced then.

Well, that's 300m of market cap, not total worth. If the company had the value of its equities disappear overnight, they'd still have a lot of assets. Plus, we don't know how much private equity there is in the company either.

In any case, it's still not that big. What you'd be looking at is for another small, but big enough entertainment company to come by with a vaguely similar product focus. For example, Hasbro competes with GW in the nerd game market. With nearly 5,000m in market cap, it would be a big enough acquisition to matter, while at the same time, they might be big enough to actually be able to do a deal. Well, maybe not Hasbro. They are able to get up towards the market cap price of GW in free cash, but only with its bump from the christmas season, and that extra money has to last them all year long to next christmas.

Which is really important. In order to make acquisitions, you need to be more than a large company - you need to have a bunch of spare cash to throw around. A great candidate for a takeover, then, would be someone like an Activision/Blizzard. Even in their summer doldrums, they're making 75m per month or so. With a bit of saving, they'd have the cash to be able to buy the company, and there is some degree of similarity between what they do and what GW does.

Not that that's required. I mean, coca-cola bought columbia pictures...

 Ailaros wrote:
In order to make acquisitions, you need to be more than a large company - you need to have a bunch of spare cash to throw around.

Not necessarily. You can borrow the money to make the purchase, or make an offer of stock shares in the combined company. Obviously it helps to have cash reserves, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to buy a company if you don't.

So, in the case of WOTC (through Hasbro) it's not that unreasonable to imagine. If GW's value falls (say, from reaching the limit where price increases and closing stores can no longer compensate for falling sales volume) it might be worth taking on extra debt to buy GW and their valuable IP, based on an assumption that the long-term profits would be enough to pay off the debt and begin to make a net gain on the purchase. And with the sales volume and market position WOTC has they could reasonably expect to find someone willing to lend the money if they had a sensible plan for GW.

Sure.

I still don't think Hasbro in specific, though. They've gone from a debt:equity ratio of .25 six years ago to 1.25 today. I don't know what big acquisitions they've made in the last few years, but at first glance, it looks like they've had several years in a row now where they only way to cover operating expenses is by going into debt (especially when you see other troubling metrics like a sliding PE ratio). In the case of this specific company, I don't know if they have the strength for an outright takeover of GW at the moment.

Of course, as you note, there's no reason GW couldn't be rolled into another company via a very friendly merger process, but I don't see GW's top brass as being that interested in selling out to anyone.

 Ailaros wrote:
Of course, as you note, there's no reason GW couldn't be rolled into another company via a very friendly merger process, but I don't see GW's top brass as being that interested in selling out to anyone.

Well, that's assuming anyone has made them an offer. Has there been any serious news of other companies being interested in buying out GW?

GW does move loads of product, but they arn't a company with huge profit margins. Although their stockholders are fat and happy.

They don't make huge profits, surprisingly. Alot of it gets sucked down the black hole that is their storefronts. And then they pay out some pretty good dividends from what I hear.

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
Seeing how Disney bought Lukasarts and right to make Star Wars I wonder if the same thing can happened to Games Workshop.
How much do you think this is possible and how much would Games Workshop worth?

And I for one, welcome our new mouse overlords!

I think Disney buying Star Wars is probably the best thing that could have happened for the brand and the movies as well, it couldn't get worse than Jar Jar and Talking pieces of wood...just saying...and I hope I didn't just jinx the new movies...anywho I digress

I've always thought that if Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) bought GW it would bring in a new enlightened era! the marketing sure would get better (i.e. GW thinking they're bigger than Wal-Mart)

Then again, all it takes to turn a failing property into a brilliant one is the right creative and marketing minds attached to it. Just look at what Hasbro's managed to do with the MLP series, and how they're making working, profiting Blockbusters out of really, really old board games and 'niche' toys.

Interestingly, the fact that GW are 'relatively small' is what allows them to get away with a near enough monopoly of English wargaming.. while there are other games played there's only a handful of the shops in the country and it's only because they have a monopoly of wargaming which is hardly a major section of the market that they havent' had steep run ins with trading standards and monopoly laws.

C-Hydra

 cute-hydra wrote:
Interestingly, the fact that GW are 'relatively small' is what allows them to get away with a near enough monopoly of English wargaming.. while there are other games played there's only a handful of the shops in the country and it's only because they have a monopoly of wargaming which is hardly a major section of the market that they havent' had steep run ins with trading standards and monopoly laws.

I don't really see how monopoly laws are relevant. There's nothing illegal about producing a superior product and having more sales than anyone else, monopoly laws are aimed at companies that use an existing advantage in market share to force their competition out of business.

 Grey Templar wrote:
GW does move loads of product, but they arn't a company with huge profit margins.

I'm pretty sure selling fractions of an ounce of plastic for $50 is a sweet profit margin.

 60mm wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
GW does move loads of product, but they arn't a company with huge profit margins.

I'm pretty sure selling fractions of an ounce of plastic for $50 is a sweet profit margin.

Until you remove the design costs, shipping costs, marketing costs, costs of operating the store, etc. There's a lot more to the cost of an item than the value of the raw materials.

Well, I'm no expert, but in the UK there are very few independent hobby stores. I believe that in the US it is more hobbyist stores than GW. As GW are responsible for bringing a majority of the wargamers into the hobby as well as providing places to play it doesn't leave a huge amount of room for anyone else to get into the business.

The superior product certainly helps cement it but warmachine and the others doesn't really have much of a chance in the industry comparatively...

I would call it a monopoly on that basis, however if it doesn't effect monopoly legislation then I am a wiser man. As I said, I am no legal expert!

Yours,
The Real C-Hydra

 Peregrine wrote:

 60mm wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
GW does move loads of product, but they arn't a company with huge profit margins.

I'm pretty sure selling fractions of an ounce of plastic for $50 is a sweet profit margin.

Until you remove the design costs, shipping costs, marketing costs, costs of operating the store, etc. There's a lot more to the cost of an item than the value of the raw materials.

You can't pull the wool over my eyes; we both know GW doesn't spend any money on marketing. In fact it it seems like they spend money on quiet the opposite; it seems like they run a constant witch hunt over there. I kid, I kid, but I think we all recognize the costs of creating the miniatures but I think it is difficult for many of us to swallow these near perpetual price hikes.

Though on the subject I don't think any company could run GW any worse then it is now. Not that things are terrible but I think their system has reached its potential and a reorganization that comes with an acquisition might be just what GW needs.

Don't forget that the various Space Marines can all be played with the same boxes of basic models, and they've been the poster boys and most popular armies since the beginning. That's a huge saving right there - no need to design entirely new basic troops or warmachines for the next updated Marine Codex, just throw in some special characters and a frame of Chapter specific frills.

The new models are also computer designed these days instead of physically sculpted, aren't they?

Uhh, I wouldn't go so far as to call GW high profit. a few years ago when they were doing really badly, they had an earnings per share of 1.4 pence. In lay man's terms, they weren't making any money.

Of course, now they've rebounded up to nearly 47p per share, but still, we're not exactly talking knockout earnings here. Of course, GW prides itself as a slow-growth company, so you'd expect it to do a bit worse than a GE or a J&J on this metric.

The only thing that bugs me is that they have a monster dividend. Tells me that they have no idea what to do with their money. Better a dividend, than, say, making a pointless acquisition, say, of a license for a popular movie franchise... but still...

It is tempered, of course, by the fact that GW is friggin 700 GBP per share. You can give big dividends out of small profits if you only have a small pool of owners.

Remember today if you loved Star Wars because today is the day the franchise died.