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I'm expecting much "good news", anything else would be otiose.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I'm expecting much "good news", anything else would be otiose.

Why would bad news be otiose?

Because people who want bad news are not GW's target audience.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I'm expecting much "good news", anything else would be otiose.

If you're the kind of gawker who sees esoteric things like increased market share, sales, and customer satisfaction as good news, you may be disappointed. If, instead, you prefer news of a dividend regardless of profits and the successful defense of 1/4 of your pigs behind your moat at thr cost of more pigs than you own, you'll likely be happy.

 warboss wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I'm expecting much "good news", anything else would be otiose.

If you're the kind of gawker who sees esoteric things like increased market share, sales, and customer satisfaction as good news, you may be disappointed. If, instead, you prefer news of a dividend regardless of profits and the successful defense of 1/4 of your pigs behind your moat at thr cost of more pigs than you own, you'll likely be happy.

ha. GW can't even afford a dividend any more it seems. Didn't they choose not to pay one out last time, prompting the share price crash?

 Azreal13 wrote:
It's out on Thursday, there's an investor's calendar on the site.

...and it should be in the Word Press Uploads folder a day or two ahead of time (in case you want a sneak peak to dump stocks because GW still hasn't learned how to use an htaccess file...). Wonder, would shorting a stock based off from something like that be considered insider trading...

Oh dis gon b gud. Fingers crossed for the gak hitting the fan at last.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
...and it should be in the Word Press Uploads folder a day or two ahead of time (in case you want a sneak peak to dump stocks because GW still hasn't learned how to use an htaccess file...). Wonder, would shorting a stock based off from something like that be considered insider trading...

I don't believe it would be. If somebody associated with GW found out about this security hole from someone inside GW, then it would be insider trading, but not if you're just some guy on the internet who acted on publicly available information that wasn't supposed to be publicly available.

Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
ha. GW can't even afford a dividend any more it seems. Didn't they choose not to pay one out last time, prompting the share price crash?

They cut it quite a bit but they still paid one. Paid one larger than their earnings for the same period.

Damn. Was actually thinking of buying something this weekend.

GW nearly always pay a dividend. They have been known to take on debt to pay a dividend.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
GW nearly always pay a dividend. They have been known to take on debt to pay a dividend.

The new annual report is due by January 14 or so. Right?

 wuestenfux wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
GW nearly always pay a dividend. They have been known to take on debt to pay a dividend.

The new annual report is due by January 14 or so. Right?

http://investor.games-workshop.com/financial-calendar/

Financial calendar
Upcoming events
14 January 2015 - Announcement of half year results

The waiting is killing me. I have my spreadsheet made with the 14/13 sales figures in it already, just need some 15 goodness to make a chart. Everybody likes charts, right?

 Torga_DW wrote:
The waiting is killing me. I have my spreadsheet made with the 14/13 sales figures in it already, just need some 15 goodness to make a chart. Everybody likes charts, right?

text removed.

Reds8n

It might be a good idea when the next report gets posted to start a new thread and just link this one in the first post so folks get some perspective (as well as not wasting the analysis done already in the past 20 pages).

Well, it's out:

http://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2014-15-Press-statement-final.pdf

6% loss in sales. Not the end of the world, but that's still quite big. And it's ONLY for a 6 month period.

"Sales
Sales fell by 6.6% to £56.5 million. The net exchange rate impact of the stronger pound was £2.1
million and, on a constant currency basis, sales were down by 1.7%. We now report our sales by
channel; our own stores: ‘Retail’; our trading partners: ‘Trade’; and our online shop: ‘Mail Order’.
"

Fall in magazine sales......Visions must be heading towards life support then.

Guess it's time for that Hail Mary pass with the new Warhammer, hey?

It's not that bad.
If there IS profit, that's enough to call it "well enough".

What i also see is that december (the month of the biggest sales) is not included in the period.

Commercially a company that breaks even is good enough.
The main problem really is that there are shareholders, they want profit growth instead of profit. That whole economic model is slowly coming to an end, GW cannot do anything about that, but still has to bear the consequences of it.

Best thing might be for shares to drop a lot, then buy all the shares and remove themselves from the stock market alltogether.
There was a lot to win in the stock market in the last few decades, but since the crisis the companies outside the stock market did better and could more easily focus on continuity instead of profit growth.

As for GW in the near future: the hail mary pass WHFB will be interesting indeed :-)

Well, we now know that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Mr. Roundtree is a Kirby stooge. "Strong weekly releases and low-cost one man retail outlets are designed to drive growth"? You're losing more money now that you've adopted that policy, you even admit your own retail sector saw the largest decline, especially outside the UK! Meanwhile, your oft-abused independent stockists only saw a small decline.

I also like the "Our biggest challenge moving forwards will be to find enough managers at all levels of the business who can drive sales and understand our culture,"

Uh, no. Maybe lack of any market research and alienation of core customer base might be a slightly larger challenge, or the consistent loss of sales through their own retail sector, especially compared to other avenues, and lack of ability to generate new customers. It's going to take more than good salesmen in your retail outlets, about 1/3 of your business, to address fundamental business problems.

Well, at least I wasn't dissapointed, I'd say this report is "broadly in line with our expectations."

RoninXiC wrote:
6% loss in sales. Not the end of the world, but that's still quite big. And it's ONLY for a 6 month period.

It's not that clear-cut because they're comparing 2/2 of 2014 with 2/2 of 2013, so there's a 6 month gap. Sales might already be in line with the gap months, which were already accounted for in the 9% drop in the last full year report. Hopefully.

The highlight I took from this report is that online sales are still essentially constant despite them sinking 4.5 mil in the new website.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
The highlight I took from this report is that online sales are still essentially constant despite them sinking 4.5 mil in the new website.

And we know that's being supported by "all-limited-all-the-time" behaviour, so I wouldn't classify that as a good news story or even an average news story.

 frozenwastes wrote:

Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
ha. GW can't even afford a dividend any more it seems. Didn't they choose not to pay one out last time, prompting the share price crash?

They cut it quite a bit but they still paid one. Paid one larger than their earnings for the same period.

They didn't (unusually for them) pay dividend year ago when they had a big drop in sales in the first half-year. They declared 36p per share dividend after last Financial year report, with earnings of 36.1p per share over that year.

Re: this new report, it's not very good because the first half of FY 13-14 was supposed to be anomalously bad, and this report is actually slightly worse. So Kirby's joy of "getting the company back on track" in previous report was premature.
OTOH, at this rate, company is not going under anytime soon either.

The bit that worries me is:

Basic earnings per share 14.5p
Dividend per share declared in the period 36p

Hey shareholders, your company made 14.5p for each share, here have more than double that (don't ask where this came from or why we are not investing anything).

 MajorStoffer wrote:
Well, we now know that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Mr. Roundtree is a Kirby stooge. "Strong weekly releases and low-cost one man retail outlets are designed to drive growth"? You're losing more money now that you've adopted that policy, you even admit your own retail sector saw the largest decline, especially outside the UK! Meanwhile, your oft-abused independent stockists only saw a small decline.

Rountree has been CEO for only 2 weeks, no? But that said, the statement could have been straight from Kirby's pen. Though in fairness it's little surprise as all corporate types sound pretty much the same.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Koppo wrote:
The bit that worries me is:

Basic earnings per share 14.5p
Dividend per share declared in the period 36p

Hey shareholders, your company made 14.5p for each share, here have more than double that (don't ask where this came from or why we are not investing anything).

That's actually dividends paid out from last years earnings: they did not declare dividends at all during 2013-14 FY.

I looked further down, June 2014 almost 25k after costs
November 2014 it is 7791 so I would be a wondering if that is a good sign or bad sign?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Page 6 Earnings per share June was down to 14.5 Pence per share, down from either 25pps and 36.1pps

 shasolenzabi wrote:

Page 6 Earnings per share June was down to 14.5 Pence per share, down from either 25pps and 36.1pps

It's properly compared to same period in last FY: in this case:
14.5p per share 2014
17.7p per share 2013
25.6p per share 2012

...not real positive development even if the profit's still good.