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How do!

It’s up and available. As we knew, they’ve overperformed again and not solely due to Licensing, as the Core Revenue is also up.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/ost7hseic9hc/1alE9DriNd0GJq1SYKn3ZY/e14d3ff03635ea919c569f075b25c60a/2024-25_half_year_report_final.pdf

Right, pick the bones out of it at your leisure, folks.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Warhammer+, perhaps surprisingly given a rather lack lustre addition of Animations has increased subs from 169,000 to 207,000.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Warhammer+, perhaps surprisingly given a rather lack lustre addition of Animations has increased subs from 169,000 to 207,000.

The free mini is the magic sauce. I bet they'd be <50k if that wasn't part of the package.

During the period our IT team moved from reporting to our CFO to our global manufacturing and supply chain director

Do they not have a CIO/CTO?

EDIT:
From their Investor Relations site:

Mark Lam was appointed to the board on 11 April 2023 and became non-executive chair on 1 November 2024. He is also currently a non-executive director of Lowland Investment Company plc and chair of the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust. Mark has many years of board experience in telecommunications and information technology. Mark was previously chief technology and information officer of Openreach and a senior executive at BT Group.

The CFO is being replaced by a group finance director so it sounds like they're shuffling responsibilities around.

The report got a significant segment on the BBC breakfast news including a University expert to explain what wargaming was


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Interesting snippit

'We are still not meeting our stock availability KPIs and not
all of our new product releases sold to our planned levels, so our write downs of the stock in our warehouses were c. £3.6
million higher than the same period last year.'

reinforces the thought that new releases are meant to sell out rather than hang around in any meaninful way

and in just how much money will depend on they doing so

I guess the FOMO is great for warehousing. Wonder if it will eventually aggravate gamers enough to do something else.

Maybe they'll stop doing those big AoS edition release boxes, since they don't seem to sell out quickly at all.

 Shakalooloo wrote:
Maybe they'll stop doing those big AoS edition release boxes, since they don't seem to sell out quickly at all.

Or maybe just put a DIFFERENT army in them that isn't always stormcast

This last boxed set even Stormcast players felt like it was one box too many, esp as it came with GW retiring a bunch of models that were not even all that old in their model line.

 Shakalooloo wrote:
Maybe they'll stop doing those big AoS edition release boxes, since they don't seem to sell out quickly at all.

They'll just make less - it would still be a big seller compared to, say, Kill Team. But they likely over forecast.

I note that website sales are down *again*. But I'm sure that website relaunch wasn't a total catastrophe. They haven't tried to claim that significant spend won't be required to fix it this time, which is more plausible than the statement at the time.

 Shakalooloo wrote:
Maybe they'll stop doing those big AoS edition release boxes, since they don't seem to sell out quickly at all.

I dunno. Seems like the Skaventide boxes are drying up much faster than Dominion did. Seemed like retailers were sitting on stacks of those until fairly recently.

I've also been selling off a bunch of Stormcast I collected from Dominion boxes and the Skaventide box. Haven't had too much trouble moving them, so demand for Stormcast seems fairly healthy.

Dominion I think got super-overproduced due to the pandemic sending all the metric numbers nuts. That said I think it also hit the wall of stores being in an exceptionally vulnerable position at the time as we were just coming out of lockdowns and such. So I think 3rd party stores were MUCH more keen to have stuff sell as fast as possible and why some dropped the stock as cheap as they could as fast as they could get other fast sellers stocked.

A postulation on production runs and predicting volume of sales.

Right now, GW is in a slightly odd place. We need only look back on their performance during and post pandemic to see that a lot of people discovered or rediscovered their offerings during that period.

And let’s face it, the building, painting and reading aspects of the hobby were ideally suited to a near global lockdown.

That clearly had some kind of lasting impact, as contrary to what was reasonably expected, there doesn’t seem to have been a Pandemic related Boom And Bust. That spike has been maintained and continued.

But. And here’s where my wondering comes in? That doesn’t mean those who found or rediscovered during that period have stuck with whatever their initial purchase was.

So, if the original spike was the Big Names, as in 40K and AoS, it may be, particularly those returning to the fold, are still spending, but have shifted their focus to say, AoD, Legions Imperialis, Necromunda, Blood Bowl and that. The smaller scale, arguable more affordable but massively engrossing games.

It's also worth noting a lot of boxes for all systems didn't sell out over the last year or so. Leviathan didn't, the Kroot box didn't, neither did the Blood Angels or the Kill Team launch box or any of the LI boxes i believe.

The Kreig box has been an anomaly in that it did. Although i get the impression it was much less stock judging by some third party email warnings about how few they got.

I've noticed a few stores like Wayland have been using a lot more "one box per customer" on GW stuff over the last few boxes. Which I think its a joint effort from stores seeing themselves getting less of this in stock from GW but also still seeing good sales.

These policies might also have lowered some of the "sell out on launch".

I did notice that the Dark Oath stuff is still quite accessible for their big boxed set that came out a while back too

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
'We are still not meeting our stock availability KPIs and not all of our new product releases sold to our planned levels, so our write downs of the stock in our warehouses were c. £3.6
million higher than the same period last year.'

Not gonna lie I'm a little amused at the thought of £3.6m worth of unsellable Inquisition battleforces sat in a dusty warehouse forever, like the end of Indiana Jones.

So time for another price hike?

We always get one of those.


That said GW has one bonus that pretty much most of their model stock won't reduce in value for a LONG time. If anything it goes UP in value over time so long as its not finecast

Even if they pull it from sale "out of production" high end models can easily go up



It's not like a LOT of other markets that basically have a huge time limit on stock going "out of date" or season or whatever. It's still money that GW could have spent producing something else, but if they've unsold stock they still have a good chance of selling it on.

Someone said website sales were down? Makes sense to me, as almost every time I go to the website what I want is out of stock.

Licensing - we own what we believe is some of the best underexploited intellectual property (‘IP’) globally. In the period
reported, a few notable games launched including Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and Warhammer 40,000: Speed
Freeks.

Can't help but laugh at the dichotomy of those two games in terms of commercial success

Impressive that they've managed to increase revenue against a year that had a 40k launch in it, that's a very health sign for the company.

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:


'We are still not meeting our stock availability KPIs and not
all of our new product releases sold to our planned levels, so our write downs of the stock in our warehouses were c. £3.6
million higher than the same period last year.'

reinforces the thought that new releases are meant to sell out rather than hang around in any meaninful way

and in just how much money will depend on they doing so

GW must be the poster child for companies that have an incredible ability to make money hand over first despite the best efforts of a mediocre (at best) senior management.

It's kind of impressive, in a way.

"If its stupid but it works, its not stupid", or - "if theyre mediocre but get results, they arent mediocre".

 xttz wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
'We are still not meeting our stock availability KPIs and not all of our new product releases sold to our planned levels, so our write downs of the stock in our warehouses were c. £3.6
million higher than the same period last year.'

Not gonna lie I'm a little amused at the thought of £3.6m worth of unsellable Inquisition battleforces sat in a dusty warehouse forever, like the end of Indiana Jones.

Can you imagine a huge dusty and abandoned warehouse packed with OOP GW stuff? Man thats the stuff of dreams.

 NAVARRO wrote:

 xttz wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
'We are still not meeting our stock availability KPIs and not all of our new product releases sold to our planned levels, so our write downs of the stock in our warehouses were c. £3.6
million higher than the same period last year.'

Not gonna lie I'm a little amused at the thought of £3.6m worth of unsellable Inquisition battleforces sat in a dusty warehouse forever, like the end of Indiana Jones.

Can you imagine a huge dusty and abandoned warehouse packed with OOP GW stuff? Man thats the stuff of dreams.

In the heart of Wales, nestled in the tongue-twisting village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, lies a top-secret Games Workshop warehouse that rivals the legendary Ark of the Covenant storage scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. To find it, you must first locate the village’s famous postbox—just past the pub with the unpronounceable name and the sheep that seems to be judging you.

Once you’ve successfully navigated the labyrinth of confusing road signs and the occasional bewildered tourist, look for a nondescript door behind the bakery that sells the best Welsh cakes this side of the Severn. Knock three times, recite the entire rules of Warhammer 40K backwards, and if you’re lucky, the door will creak open to reveal a cavernous space filled with towering shelves of dusty boxes.

But beware! This isn’t just any warehouse; it’s a shrine to the infamous Penitent Engine, the most diabolically complex pewter miniature ever created by Games Workshop. Legend has it that assembling one of these bad boys requires not only a steady hand but also a PhD in engineering and a strong cup of tea. So, if you’re brave enough to tackle the Penitent Engine, just remember: it’s not just a model; it’s a rite of passage. And if you hear ominous chanting, it’s probably just the other hobbyists who’ve lost their sanity trying to put one together!

chaos0xomega wrote:
"If its stupid but it works, its not stupid", or - "if theyre mediocre but get results, they arent mediocre".

I mean, you can have that interpretation if you like. Sometimes there are people and organisations who just manage to fail upward, contingency and luck are often far more important in success than most like to admit. More than though, you know, if you want a use a cliché quote it seems more like a "standing on the shoulders of giants" type situation to me (that's a little hyperbolic really, but the twin pillars of their success are a decades-old IP that just seems to be nerd cocaine and a near-monopoly size advantage over any potential competitor in their niche kind which are bigger factors than almost any decision made by those running the show).

Seriously though, to go back to that extract from the report, what does it say about GW's understanding of their customer base (beyond a - "they'll buy whatever plastic crack we through at them - especially if it's a space marine!" view) that they simultaneously manage to be unable to keep things that sell well in stock and have over £3 million in stuff they can't sell. I mean, I we all know market research is oitose in a niche, but I do find fascinating it that this seems to be a long-term problem rather than a one-off (not that it is stopping them from making tons of money, but still).

Problem is, you can't fail upwards constantly, year on year. That's illogical, so they have to be doing something right.

Do they over produce on the FOMO? Yeah. But they seem to have addressed that with the Krieg box which seems to have been made with much less stock judging by the third party emails. Although that will go back to square one again with people complaining they can't get hold of anything.

What Gideon said. Also keep in mind, the current business practices of GW were very much intentional chanfes comibg out of the tom kirby era and moving into the kevin rountee era. The guy identified problejs with hkw GW dud business, made changes to address them, and has been signifucamtly rewarded for it. Revenue is up 5x in that timeframe, profit margins are the envy of many other businesses and ibdustries, stock value is insane. Is it possible there are other decisions that could be made which wpuld do even better? Sure, and if Rommel hadnt gone on vacation in early June 1944 maybe WW2 would have had a different outcome and proven Churchill correct in favoring landings in the Mediterranean over Normandy. We dont know and will never know, so arguments of that nature are completely moot, the actual results we have in the real wprld demobstrate GW is on point.