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This came up in the discussion on shortages in new Tau products.

AFAIK about a year ago, GW closed its production facility in China (still outsourcing some printing though).

The US production facilities in Memphis were also closed a few months ago:

 Captain Vyper wrote:
As mikhaila posted,
US manufacturing is gone several months ago, machines were sold off, molds returned to the UK, plant manager given his walking papers. Memphis is currently a giant warehouse for shipping and receiving.

Seems, only the UK facilities are left.

This coincidences with predictions by people reading the yearly GW business reports, seeing that the total revenue (inflation adjusted) is more or less flat for 7 years, since 2006. Given massive price increases above inflation rate (including metal to Finecast conversions and rising Codex prices), the actual sales should decrease substantially over the same period.


The closing of all non-UK production facilities and shortages of products if anything surprisingly sells well, are probably the best evidence we currently have that GW is actually shrinking. Most of us suspected that anyway. Also remember that even plastic kits like the Basilisk or Catachans were taken from the shelves.

So, does anybody else have any insight in this?

It's interesting to note that the Mephis plant has closed down, simply because one of the primary reasons for it opening in the first place was the apparent acknowledgement that if there was a fire or something in Nottingham the company would have lost its whole production capability.*

So with that in mind, is it possible that premise has changed somehow?


* prompted by the container ship sinking all those years ago, and yes those Eldar Falcons are still there for anyone with the grit and determination to get them

 Pacific wrote:
It's interesting to note that the Mephis plant has closed down, simply because one of the primary reasons for it opening in the first place was the apparent acknowledgement that if there was a fire or something in Nottingham the company would have lost its whole production capability.*

So with that in mind, is it possible that premise has changed somehow?


* prompted by the container ship sinking all those years ago, and yes those Eldar Falcons are still there for anyone with the grit and determination to get them

So does that mean all it takes is one fire?

Initially I thought that this was simply another scam, and GW was lying about being out of stock of products to try and increase demand and screw over FLGS. However after hearing about the Tennessee plant closing my opinion has changed. GW is attempting in any way possible to desperately produce good profit reports even if it damages them long term. Insane price hikes, switching to low-quality building materials (finecast), one man stores with limited hours/no gaming, scam "limited edition" products twice the amount of the original (something that has moved into BL).I think closing production facilities and selling the machinery off is another such attempt to produce positive results to shareholders for at least one more year.

Shame they're so short-sighted.

Hey fellas,

Corporate sell-offs are a pretty hard thing.

My wife worked for a petroleum company that decided to sell its self. They fired half the management first.

It would actually be a good thing for our hobby community to see the proverbial goliath get knocke dout by the wave of Kickstarter projects that actually respond to their customers.

It now looks like the missing Tau stock has been found

US/UK games stores that had been told they wern't getting anything have now been told their stuff will arrive as planned

and the ''availablilty 1-2 weeks" which had appeared on a number of the new Tau kits on the UK GW webstore have reverted back to "advance order" as they were originally

I wonder if there wasn't some sort of software glitch ? The computer went wonky and GW thought they'd run out of stock, but it was really still there in the warehouses

Maybe they're just not sending anything to Australia?



But on a more serious note:

Did the Memphis Plant really do that much? By all accounts, they only had the molds for the "most popular" models. I can't think of anything really that had "Made in USA" recently from GW, all of it has been China/UK.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Maybe they're just not sending anything to Australia?



But on a more serious note:

Did the Memphis Plant really do that much? By all accounts, they only had the molds for the "most popular" models. I can't think of anything really that had "Made in USA" recently from GW, all of it has been China/UK.

The problem that I have with the closure is that England is not so business friendly as taxes is rather ugly over there.

So there has to be more to this than closing this plant in the US. My Question is exactly where are all of the manufacturing is currently being done?
An important question to follow.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Maybe they're just not sending anything to Australia?



But on a more serious note:

Did the Memphis Plant really do that much? By all accounts, they only had the molds for the "most popular" models. I can't think of anything really that had "Made in USA" recently from GW, all of it has been China/UK.

Australian stuff will be online only with $1000AUD shipping price tag /sarcasm

GW better have another factory somewhere otherwise they've put all their precious eggs in one basket...

FarseerAndyMan wrote:
It would actually be a good thing for our hobby community to see the proverbial goliath get knocke dout by the wave of Kickstarter projects that actually respond to their customers.

I definitely don't want to see GW knocked out. I want to see them get a punch in the teeth and realise they can't the one and only game in town and go back to having pro-customer, pro-retailer and pro-gaming business models.

Per a warseer post from 2011, there were six injection machines. In addition to metal figure production.
http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?301402-GW-Memphis-Factory-Tour-Impressions-and-Notes

I know there was talk that all finecast production is done in the UK now, so those machines became redundant. As for the plastic, per the tread it sounded like there were significantly more machines in the UK. Other possibilities is the logistics costs did not justify supporting the smaller facility. Having boxes and materials shipped to two different locations to support production might have ceased to make sense.

One thing that strikes me odd is that this is the first we have heard of it. I don't doubt Mikhaila, but a major event like this would have made news in certain circles. This is the type of "improvements in production and efficiency" that would make it into the annual report. If it did happen, it would have had to have happened in the last four month. Also we don't know if production has increased in the UK. That advertisement for a new Work Cell Manager may mean they are planning to.

Looking back at some old threads trying to find information, there are a couple times people have claimed US production shut down. Some as early as 2009. In all the threads talk of fuel costs driving it popped up.

I personally think the GW rep is messing with Mikhaila. Probably trying to give the poor man a heart attack. Stock, what stock?

When you sell less and less units every year, you obviously don't need to maintain multiple production houses. It makes sense to scale back production if demand isn't meeting supply.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
When you sell less and less units every year, you obviously don't need to maintain multiple production houses. It makes sense to scale back production if demand isn't meeting supply.

No, that's not the reason. It's most likely something to do with minimum wages.



Seems like an odd move unless they're doing really badly in the US.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Maybe they're just not sending anything to Australia?



But on a more serious note:

Did the Memphis Plant really do that much? By all accounts, they only had the molds for the "most popular" models. I can't think of anything really that had "Made in USA" recently from GW, all of it has been China/UK.

The Memphis facility had made the top selling plastic, metal and metal/plastic hybrid kits (the top 100 IIRC) for finished goods.

When it came to metal components (bits) we had molds for pretty much everything from the early 90's to about 2007 when we stopped ordering molds since the bits range was being discontinued. We had a huge number of molds for older codes that the UK didn't even have anymore.

For new releases starting around 2006 we were shipped "hand me down" molds from the UK, which usually were in horrible condition and could not produce any good quality metal. They should have been scrapped instead of being sent to us.

So in the end we were ordering cast metal for Direct Sales needs for new releases to full-fill bits orders. From what I've heard even that has stopped. As for the rest of manufacturing, I have no idea if they are still doing any in Memphis.

 Pacific wrote:
* prompted by the container ship sinking all those years ago, and yes those Eldar Falcons are still there for anyone with the grit and determination to get them

BRB, starting an eldar army.

 insaniak wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
When you sell less and less units every year, you obviously don't need to maintain multiple production houses. It makes sense to scale back production if demand isn't meeting supply.

No, that's not the reason. It's most likely something to do with minimum wages.



Seems like an odd move unless they're doing really badly in the US.

Again, Why the UK? From a business standpoint this make no sense to me. If they placed their manufacturing plant in Ireland than I would have agreed that would be a practical move.

These are the things that are noted and placed in my Data Files. These not to normal business moves (to me that is) of late coming from this corporation. Maybe the is reality is that GW is contracting faster than I would have expected.

I can say first hand that one of my holdings that is heavily influenced by consumerism, I am down 1% net profit than this time last year. As I have been saying, there is no true economic recovery (in the US) and I do not see one anytime soon. I do see changes on how people purchase things as their ability of purchasing things have been greatly reduced within the past 5 years. And this does affect those middle class people who are thinking or not to spend on a luxury item.

Again I'm not sure on the whys GW move their manufacturing plants from the US back to the UK?

What am I missing that makes this feasible? Are they cross sourcing their workload to a smaller group of people in the UK? Is there something else? I hope that someone has some logical reasoning for this to happen.

Just not quite sure what it is at this moment of time.

 Adam LongWalker wrote:

Again, Why the UK? From a business standpoint this make no sense to me.

Just not quite sure what it is at this moment of time.

Friend of a friend bit of information; the new plastic models (Dark Eldar and later) are cast on machines with very high tolerances. They have to bring in a specialist to perform maintenance on them. These are newer machines and it sounds like the ones in the US were older.

GW would have to purchase new machines and retrain the existing US workers to use them if they wanted to replace them. Otherwise certain kits can't be produced in the US. GW may have decided it was cheaper to add an additional line in the UK facility than retrofit the US one. This part is speculation, but one possible reason.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Maybe they're just not sending anything to Australia?

So funny *golf clap*

H.B.M.C. wrote:When you sell less and less units every year, you obviously don't need to maintain multiple production houses. It makes sense to scale back production if demand isn't meeting supply.

As I said in a previous post, I think it was done not only because of growth in the US, but more importantly because it meant there were 2 sources of production if there were a critical fault (such as a fire) in Lenton.

jonolikespie wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
* prompted by the container ship sinking all those years ago, and yes those Eldar Falcons are still there for anyone with the grit and determination to get them

BRB, starting an eldar army.

Don't forget to source a depth-charge before you go!

 Adam LongWalker wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
When you sell less and less units every year, you obviously don't need to maintain multiple production houses. It makes sense to scale back production if demand isn't meeting supply.

No, that's not the reason. It's most likely something to do with minimum wages.



Seems like an odd move unless they're doing really badly in the US.

Again, Why the UK? From a business standpoint this make no sense to me. If they placed their manufacturing plant in Ireland than I would have agreed that would be a practical move.

These are the things that are noted and placed in my Data Files. These not to normal business moves (to me that is) of late coming from this corporation. Maybe the is reality is that GW is contracting faster than I would have expected.

I can say first hand that one of my holdings that is heavily influenced by consumerism, I am down 1% net profit than this time last year. As I have been saying, there is no true economic recovery (in the US) and I do not see one anytime soon. I do see changes on how people purchase things as their ability of purchasing things have been greatly reduced within the past 5 years. And this does affect those middle class people who are thinking or not to spend on a luxury item.

Again I'm not sure on the whys GW move their manufacturing plants from the US back to the UK?

What am I missing that makes this feasible? Are they cross sourcing their workload to a smaller group of people in the UK? Is there something else? I hope that someone has some logical reasoning for this to happen.

Just not quite sure what it is at this moment of time.

Why the UK?

Well, firstly GW is a UK based company so they probably understand the law and such better here than in the US (yes, you could hire all new US staff, but that quickly becomes expensive). As they trade on the UK stockmarket I would imagine that the stockholders also expect the office to be in the UK – a UK traded company that only has offices in the US would seem very strange to me

Secondly all the production staff and everything else is already employed in the UK, having to either pay to relocate them all to Ireland or replace those that don’t want to lave and make the rest redundant would be pretty huge I imagine, not to mention the fact that quality would probably drop whilst you get the new staff “upto speed”

Third, I’m pretty sure that GW own the building and in Nottingham outright, and had it custom built for their needs. I would imagine that if they sold it the fact it is designed for a GW needs would probably mean they make a big loss, and then they would have to pay to set it all up in a new area.

So, those are probably the reasons they stick it out in the UK. If they were starting completely as a new business but with the cash to be as big as GW then they may well setup somewhere else, but they are an existing business and the risk of just shutting it all down and shipping overseas to start anew is probably deemed to be too high.

Could it be that the growth from 2001-2004 from the LOTR boom caused GW to expand a bit further than they could actually maintain?

Not that I have any economic background in anything, but it's a thought. And with the Hobbit looking like a dud, we'll see what goes down.

The closure of the LA Bunker and other smaller stores (Block at Orange a couple years back, The Gateway at Mountain Village) also suggests cutbacks, as well as the aforementioned price hikes and decrease in sales.

Still, what my tiny human brain perceives is that the 2012 bar is slightly higher than 2011, if but a little.

One can only wonder what the future holds, and I personally hope it's a good one.

It'll bounce up and down for a while around the 2007/2008 levels, but I doubt the way it's going it'll see LoTR era levels again for a while. That little bump up is probably a bit of the 6th edition hype. Though better than the rollercoaster from 2004-2008.

Why the UK? It is most probably standard GW upper management control freakery.

You never know -- some of those plant operators in Memphis might not have been perfect fits for the GW corporate culture.

 Cryonicleech wrote:
Could it be that the growth from 2001-2004 from the LOTR boom caused GW to expand a bit further than they could actually maintain?

GW could easily double their sales with standard marketing and standard business decision (plus cooperation with a.o. DeAgostini with the Hobbit). But as long as dividends are high enough for Tim Kirby, this won't happen.

 Pacific wrote:
prompted by the container ship sinking all those years ago, and yes those Eldar Falcons are still there for anyone with the grit and determination to get them

There's also 2 of the old metal Thunderhawk Gunships in that container as well, or so I was told by several senior staff when I worked for GW in Baltimore.

GW also owns the facility in Memphis, they had it built specially for their needs. One of the initial reasons was for "disaster recovery" but they never did anything after around 2006 to improve Memphis' ability to cover product made in the UK if something happened in Lenton, so the "disaster recovery" plan really never got put into play.

 Ian Sturrock wrote:
You never know -- some of those plant operators in Memphis might not have been perfect fits for the GW corporate culture.

This. You have no idea just how much you hit the nail on the head with that statement. The staff who did fit into GW's culture were systematically weeded out by management since they usually performed better and genuinely cared about the company (myself being one of those who cared).

I worked in Memphis from 2003-2007 and can say that many of the supervisors and managers there were incompetent, corporate ladder-climbing suck-ups or were just there for a paycheck and did the bare minimum to get the job done.

We had to keep explaining to the UK staff that they call it "The Lazy South" for a reason.

Lord of the Rings was huge back in its day. It's understandable that GW would scale back production as demand for LOTR has slumped.

 BryllCream wrote:
Lord of the Rings was huge back in its day. It's understandable that GW would scale back production as demand for LOTR has slumped.

Sorry, timeline doesn't really fit, LOTR has been on its arse for far too long to explain actions now. Plus, some of that slack will have been taken up by the Hobbit, albeit not as much as they'd like I'm sure.

Timing of the LOTR fits in perfectly with that graph.

[

The spike in 2009 is when I started playing 40K again.

 BryllCream wrote:
Timing of the LOTR fits in perfectly with that graph.

But doesn't fit at all with actions taken by GW in the last 12 months, which is what we're talking about.