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 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

As of May 2014; approximately 1.5% of revenue.

So, yeah, hotcakes indeed.

I believe you, I just don't believe the GW representative. The data goes against everything he said.

I would not be surprised if LoTR and The Hobbit were big sellers in Asian markets compared to 40K/Fantasy in the same markets.

That variety of high fantasy has massive prior traction as well as the impact of the films. Think of Record of Lodoss War, Final Fantasy, and so on.

 JamesY wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

It's the smallest region in terms of revenue. Tau were made purely to appeal to that market. They are fortunate that the animae explosion happened in western markets.

I remember at the time of that release some friends of mine, who had lived in Japan, and what they thought of the prospects of the Tau in the Japanese market.

Essentially, it represented a complete mis-fire in terms of reading the culture and market and didn't stand a pope's chance in hell..

Shame as I still think there is a massive untapped market in Japan/S. Korea for miniature wargaming. Generally well educated youth that tend to have patience, free time, really high disposable income. It just needs a company to read the market correctly, team up with a local retailer and put some money into it.

Pacific wrote:I remember at the time of that release some friends of mine, who had lived in Japan, and what they thought of the prospects of the Tau in the Japanese market.

Essentially, it represented a complete mis-fire in terms of reading the culture and market and didn't stand a pope's chance in hell..

Maybe the Japanese don't like giant robots with little heads. I know this kind of thing seems to be a GW trademark at the moment (I believe it started with the Hellbrute?), but come on... why have a twenty foot tall killing machine with a tiny head, it looks weird.

Now this is what I call a good robot head!
(clearly its subjective.)

 NoPoet wrote:

Pacific wrote:I remember at the time of that release some friends of mine, who had lived in Japan, and what they thought of the prospects of the Tau in the Japanese market.

Essentially, it represented a complete mis-fire in terms of reading the culture and market and didn't stand a pope's chance in hell..

Maybe the Japanese don't like giant robots with little heads. I know this kind of thing seems to be a GW trademark at the moment (I believe it started with the Hellbrute?), but come on... why have a twenty foot tall killing machine with a tiny head, it looks weird.

More that GW was trying to move into a niche that was already over supplied.

Vaguely Tau looking things are already widely available in Japan - so it lacked novelty.

The Auld Grump

Robot models in Japan are generally of higher quality for similar or cheaper price. GW then tried to get into the Japanese market by offering digital pdfs of the rules and army books for free in Japanese. I don't know if they still do this, Kid Kyoto could tell us, but I remember when I lived in Koshigaya, north of Tokyo in Saitama pref, that I first thought people were pirating the books. One of the reasons it didn't catch on in Japan is the sheer space needed to play. There was a sizable game store in Yokohama that had maybe 2 tables available and another in Osaka; I don't know of any other stores which could have supported gaming.

Way better quality, for a much cheaper price. There's no way you'd buy Tau over Gundam if it was just for modelling. It's hard to express in words how superior Gundam is to GW.

 Enigwolf wrote:
To answer the questions, the person I spoke to was a senior regional director, one of the guys in charge of the Asia-Pacific Region. He was at our FLGS for a meeting with distributors some time back. The central and east Asia market actually consumes a lot of LotR - outsells all of their other product lines, actually.

I wonder if that's because the other 2 lines sell particularly badly? I know that a few years ago it was cheaper to buy from FW than GW Japan, but I don't know how far back. That'd mean a lot of 40K sales would have been reported as being UK.

There isn't really an equivalent for LOTR, and it generally needs less stuff, so I can see it being more popular (or, rather, less unpopular), but I can't see the East Asian market providing enough revenue to allow them to try anything risky.* They will have had enough money during the LOTR boom to take some risks though.

*When was the last time GW did anything particularly risky? Dreadfleet?

Technically, everything they do is risky, as without any sort of market research, they don't know why what they do works or doesn't.

Herzlos wrote:
Way better quality, for a much cheaper price. There's no way you'd buy Tau over Gundam if it was just for modelling. It's hard to express in words how superior Gundam is to GW.

 Enigwolf wrote:
To answer the questions, the person I spoke to was a senior regional director, one of the guys in charge of the Asia-Pacific Region. He was at our FLGS for a meeting with distributors some time back. The central and east Asia market actually consumes a lot of LotR - outsells all of their other product lines, actually.

I wonder if that's because the other 2 lines sell particularly badly? I know that a few years ago it was cheaper to buy from FW than GW Japan, but I don't know how far back. That'd mean a lot of 40K sales would have been reported as being UK.

There isn't really an equivalent for LOTR, and it generally needs less stuff, so I can see it being more popular (or, rather, less unpopular), but I can't see the East Asian market providing enough revenue to allow them to try anything risky.* They will have had enough money during the LOTR boom to take some risks though.

*When was the last time GW did anything particularly risky? Dreadfleet?

Blowing up the fantasy world?

Herzlos wrote:
Way better quality, for a much cheaper price. There's no way you'd buy Tau over Gundam if it was just for modelling. It's hard to express in words how superior Gundam is to GW.

 Enigwolf wrote:
To answer the questions, the person I spoke to was a senior regional director, one of the guys in charge of the Asia-Pacific Region. He was at our FLGS for a meeting with distributors some time back. The central and east Asia market actually consumes a lot of LotR - outsells all of their other product lines, actually.

I wonder if that's because the other 2 lines sell particularly badly? I know that a few years ago it was cheaper to buy from FW than GW Japan, but I don't know how far back. That'd mean a lot of 40K sales would have been reported as being UK.

There isn't really an equivalent for LOTR, and it generally needs less stuff, so I can see it being more popular (or, rather, less unpopular), but I can't see the East Asian market providing enough revenue to allow them to try anything risky.* They will have had enough money during the LOTR boom to take some risks though.

*When was the last time GW did anything particularly risky? Dreadfleet?

Remember that these were years ago, not present-day, when their LotR sales were booming. I don't know what specifically with "risks" he was talking about, but I'd speculate on possibly the quick turnaround from 6th to 7th recently. I don't remember what year LotR was at or what was going on in the 40k world at the time, since I was hiatus from the game for studies at the time.

That said, I've been to about half a dozen FLGS's regularly in Asia - more unregularly - and with a business and finance background I love chatting to the owners of FLGS's about how their stores do. Most FLGS's in Asia don't sustain themselves with 40k or Fantasy sales from regulars, typically it's a lot of walk-in traffic for family-style board games and older collectors with disposable income who splurge. I'd theorize it comes down to a combination of a cultural (more family-centric values) and economic thing, as for the most part I'd reckon the income gap is pretty big here between middle and upper class due to costs of living in countries like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and with the higher price-points here middle class individuals find it hard to get into a hobby like 40k/Fantasy. As a result of this, there are less FLGS's truly dedicated to wargaming in this area of the world, so it's harder to sustain a gaming community.

Furthermore, since a lot of FLGS's do Direct Order from GW HQ rather than going through distributorship (distributorship in Asia-Pacific tends to play favorites, or in some extreme cases be corrupt, for a lot markets, to say the least), I don't know how this factors into revenue recognition at GWHQ. I suspect it gets recognized under the European market, however, not Asia-Pacific. As a result, I would hypothesize that the revenue and sales figures for the Asia-Pacific region are grossly under-recognized.

Thus, it doesn't surprise me if LotR has sold more than 40k/Fantasy in the Asia-Pacific region simply due to the target market it happens to appeal to - kids who saw the movies with their parents and older individuals who've been a fan of Tolkien who have the disposable income to throw at it.

 JamesY wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

It's the smallest region in terms of revenue. Tau were made purely to appeal to that market. They are fortunate that the animae explosion happened in western markets.

No, no, no... Tau were a competely sui generis idea that the GW desidn studio came up with. It had no connection, whatsoever, to anime. I mean, that's what they do. They come up with cool ideas that are completely their own creation!

Or at least that was the claim (under oath?) during the Chapterhouse debacle...

Valete,

JohnS

Anecdotally speaking, I've never seen anyone here play LotR. LotR boxes are gathering dust in Neutral Grounds shops. And obviously I'm in the Asia-Pacific region. I'm in Asia and I can see the Pacific Ocean right here where I work.

 agnosto wrote:
Robot models in Japan are generally of higher quality for similar or cheaper price. GW then tried to get into the Japanese market by offering digital pdfs of the rules and army books for free in Japanese. I don't know if they still do this, Kid Kyoto could tell us, but I remember when I lived in Koshigaya, north of Tokyo in Saitama pref, that I first thought people were pirating the books. One of the reasons it didn't catch on in Japan is the sheer space needed to play. There was a sizable game store in Yokohama that had maybe 2 tables available and another in Osaka; I don't know of any other stores which could have supported gaming.

There is a group in Osaka who meets at the community center every 2 weeks, but yeah most Japanese live in Apartments with no space to play games, talking about price.
Menchanicus robot?

Hi mook from gundam built fighters fully posable with weapons for 980yen (les than 10$)

Thud wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

As of May 2014; approximately 1.5% of revenue.

So, yeah, hotcakes indeed.

It depends whether Asia-Pacific includes Australia or if it's just Asia. Traditionally it does, and Asia + Australia is 9.5% of total revenue. But if we're only talking about Asia rather than Asia + Australia, yeah, it's only 1.54%.

MWHistorian wrote:I believe you, I just don't believe the GW representative. The data goes against everything he said.

Exactly. It's not that I think Enigwolf is lying at all. But I certainly don't believe anyone representing GW in an official capacity is going to say anything that might tarnish the name of itself, its products or its affiliates.

That's why it's important to know who said it, under what setting and even if things are bad, do you really expect a company representative to say "things are bad"? Of course not, they're going to try and spin it any way they possibly can in order to keep their job.

weeble1000 wrote:
We know anecdotally that LOtR is dead in the U.S., GW's biggest market

Actually, GW's biggest market is mainland Europe, followed by the USA followed by the UK, but they're all pretty equal splits of the revenue pie (33%, 30% and 26% respectively).

(I know I'm being nitpicky, but I think it's important to remember that while the USA is important GW's stronghold is in Europe, with almost 60% of total revenue coming from Europe, even Australia is reasonably important to overall revenue at 8%).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 heartserenade wrote:
Anecdotally speaking, I've never seen anyone here play LotR. LotR boxes are gathering dust in Neutral Grounds shops. And obviously I'm in the Asia-Pacific region. I'm in Asia and I can see the Pacific Ocean right here where I work.

Anecdotally, if you'd asked me 10+ years ago, LOTR was very popular here. There was a time in my local area when it was easier to get a game of LOTR than it was to get a game of 40k or WHFB, and if you wanted a game of 40k it would most certainly be against a teenager while LOTR had a more mature gamer base.

These days? I haven't met anyone who plays it for quite a while.

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

I'll look it up.

Last year Australia sold 8.633 million pounds worth of product that amounts to 7% of global turnover.

 Achaylus72 wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

I'll look it up.

Last year Australia sold 8.633 million pounds worth of product that amounts to 7% of global turnover.

Does Asia Pacific not include markets like China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines , Singapore, Korea, et cetera?

 Talys wrote:

 Achaylus72 wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

I'll look it up.

Last year Australia sold 8.633 million pounds worth of product that amounts to 7% of global turnover.

Does Asia Pacific not include markets like China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines , Singapore, Korea, et cetera?

Yeah sorry for the mix up, you are correct. Unlike Australia and New Zealand which is operated by Games Workshop Oz PTY LTD. The Asia Pacific region is around 1.5% of revenue.

Cheers.

 Achaylus72 wrote:

 Talys wrote:

 Achaylus72 wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

I'll look it up.

Last year Australia sold 8.633 million pounds worth of product that amounts to 7% of global turnover.

Does Asia Pacific not include markets like China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines , Singapore, Korea, et cetera?

Yeah sorry for the mix up, you are correct. Unlike Australia and New Zealand which is operated by Games Workshop Oz PTY LTD. The Asia Pacific region is around 1.5% of revenue.

Cheers.

If you say "Asia-Pacific", that includes Australia. If you don't want to include Australia, then you just call it "Asia", the "Pacific" bit is NZ/Australia/New Guinea.

But then Enigwolf said

 Enigwolf wrote:
The central and east Asia market actually consumes a lot of LotR - outsells all of their other product lines, actually.

If we're only talking about EAST ASIA, then that's a mostly insignificant market. If we're talking Asia-Pacific, that's a significant chunk of revenue (not the largest obviously, but I consider 9.5% of global revenue a considerable chunk).

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Achaylus72 wrote:

 Talys wrote:

 Achaylus72 wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Do we know how much the asia-pacific region represents of their total revenue?

I'll look it up.

Last year Australia sold 8.633 million pounds worth of product that amounts to 7% of global turnover.

Does Asia Pacific not include markets like China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines , Singapore, Korea, et cetera?

Yeah sorry for the mix up, you are correct. Unlike Australia and New Zealand which is operated by Games Workshop Oz PTY LTD. The Asia Pacific region is around 1.5% of revenue.

Cheers.

If you say "Asia-Pacific", that includes Australia. If you don't want to include Australia, then you just call it "Asia", the "Pacific" bit is NZ/Australia/New Guinea.

But then Enigwolf said

 Enigwolf wrote:
The central and east Asia market actually consumes a lot of LotR - outsells all of their other product lines, actually.

If we're only talking about EAST ASIA, then that's a mostly insignificant market. If we're talking Asia-Pacific, that's a significant chunk of revenue (not the largest obviously, but I consider 9.5% of global revenue a considerable chunk).

We're getting into semantics now. My original comment reflected all of Asia-Pacific, including Australia and NZ. The specific comment I made about LotR that you quoted was about LotR. Australia makes huge amounts of revenues relative to the COGS because of the extreme mark-up rate that GW consumers pay for their products there.

 Enigwolf wrote:
We're getting into semantics now. My original comment reflected all of Asia-Pacific, including Australia and NZ. The specific comment I made about LotR that you quoted was about LotR.

I'm getting in to semantics because they're important semantics. Whether or not you include Australia is the difference between 1.5% and 9.5%.

Australia makes huge amounts of revenues relative to the COGS because of the extreme mark-up rate that GW consumers pay for their products there.

Depends what you define as "huge". Yes, they make more per item sold in Australia, but it's still a significant market, more so than the rest of Asia.

Either way.... while I don't think you're lying in that you spoke to someone from GW and that person said what you said they said.... I honestly don't think it's even remotely significant that they said that. Whether things are going well or going badly, OF COURSE they are still going to try and spin it in a way that makes it sound good. They'd be stupid if they didn't.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
]If you say "Asia-Pacific", that includes Australia. If you don't want to include Australia, then you just call it "Asia", the "Pacific" bit is NZ/Australia/New Guinea.

GW sales regions =/= actual geographic regions.

For example, when talking about GW regions, "UK" means UK+Ireland, "Continental Europe" means France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Northern Europe, "North America" means US+Canada. Luckily, they don't define Asia beyond "China, Japan (retail) and Asia (trade).

For further confusion, GW does also operate with the term Asia Pacific, which is the actual Asia Pacific, when they analyse all sales (including FW, BL, DE and the online store, as well as to countries outside their main regions).

 Thud wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
]If you say "Asia-Pacific", that includes Australia. If you don't want to include Australia, then you just call it "Asia", the "Pacific" bit is NZ/Australia/New Guinea.

GW sales regions =/= actual geographic regions.

Indeedy, I used to work for a company that included the UK in "Southern Europe" ! Silly Scandinavians....

 Enigwolf wrote:
Remember that these were years ago, not present-day, when their LotR sales were booming. I don't know what specifically with "risks" he was talking about, but I'd speculate on possibly the quick turnaround from 6th to 7th recently. I don't remember what year LotR was at or what was going on in the 40k world at the time, since I was hiatus from the game for studies at the time.

I can comfortably believe that, LOTR seems to have propped up GW in it's boom, and even in the UK they seemed to have problem keeping up with demand. But that died off a decade ago (ROTK launched in 2003) and never came back with the Hobbit, before the prices went crazy.

Anyways, I'm just curious, after all the semantics...

What's are the revenues of Australia/New Zealand as a percentage of the global revenue?

I wouldn't overthink gross or net profit, unless you're able to obtain costs. For all you know, the cost of operating a distribution center in Australia, shipping to the region, and managing the sales channel there is very high. Or the profits could be fantastic. We just don't know.

Sadly we can only guess, as GW's management decided last year no longer to report sales by region. Instead they are going to report sales by channel, meaning web/mail order, retail (GW shops) and distributor (independant shops).

Profits per region obviously area an important factor since the management must decide whether a region represents a potential growth market and deserves to be financially supported while unprofitable as the game takes off.

I would guess that GW saw East Asia in this category 15 years ago, since the cost of translating all the books to Japanese and releasing them free would have been pretty considerable and justified by the expectation that massive sales of kits would follow. That did not happen, though.

 Talys wrote:
Anyways, I'm just curious, after all the semantics...

What's are the revenues of Australia/New Zealand as a percentage of the global revenue?

I wouldn't overthink gross or net profit, unless you're able to obtain costs. For all you know, the cost of operating a distribution center in Australia, shipping to the region, and managing the sales channel there is very high. Or the profits could be fantastic. We just don't know.

I mentioned it earlier on this page but you must have missed it If you take each region's sales but ignore "All other sales businesses" in the 2014 report then Australia is 8% of global revenue for 2014 (down from 9% in 2013). I assume that includes NZ but it's not actually specified in the report so maybe it doesn't. "Asia" is only 1.54% in 2014 and 1.52% in 2013.

It's interesting to note Australia has 40 stores compared to North America's 87, that means Australia has 1.7 stores per million in Australia compared to 0.16 stores per million in NA. I found those to be an interesting statistics given the frequent discussions on Australian pricing.

As for profit, it's all in the 2014 report, this is profit in thousands of pounds per segment...

UK 2,244 (2014) 5,227 (2013)
Continental Europe 4,790 (2014) 5,218 (2013)
North America 3,720 (2014) 3,336 (2013)
Australia 557 (2014) 756 (2013)
Export 581 (2014) 457 (2013)
Asia 223 (2014) 155 (2013)

It's worth noting that the Australian vs GBP exchange rate changed dramatically from 2013 to 2014, so it's probably not worth comparing 2013 numbers to 2014 numbers unless you normalise them by the exchange rate.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I find it all quite interesting. That means Australia has around half as many stores as the USA, but the actual COSTS in Australia are around a third of the USA. But I think because they have so many stores in Australia, the revenue to profit ratio is poor. But then if they removed the stores they'd probably be up the creek because they've successfully pissed off so many of the FLGS's and online stores. Having a large number of stores in Australia probably goes back to the late 90's when the stores were (anecdotally) performing extremely well.

 Enigwolf wrote:
To answer the questions, the person I spoke to was a senior regional director, one of the guys in charge of the Asia-Pacific Region. He was at our FLGS for a meeting with distributors some time back. The central and east Asia market actually consumes a lot of LotR - outsells all of their other product lines, actually.

This is the internet, believe me or don't believe me, that's your choice - I'm just sharing what I heard and I have no reason to cook up something like that. Shrug, I couldn't care less. I was one of the early anonymous rumor reporters that told Natfka about the mass Finecast->Plastic-maybe-resin switch back in '12.

Thanks for letting it roll off Enigwolf. Have an exalt.

I appreciate the input, despite the fact that I called it BS. Note that I was not saying you were misrepresenting what you heard.

Anyway, I appreciate you being cool about getting jumped on.

If a portion (one hopes Asia is selling more than LoTR kits) of 9% of your overall, global sales are propping up your entire LoTR line, your company has serious issues.