Ratliker wrote:So, as far as I understand:
1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits),
at the cost of their games' balance, players' feelings (=lost customers) or whatever (long term profits).
2. They are not dumb. They might be following some perverted form of alien logic of their xenos masters from Zeta-reticuli or whatever, but they are not idiots.

Some of their policies, however, don’t make sense to me whatsoever. Lets consider Tyranids releases. The last codex was released, together with Hive Guard, a perfect anti-mech unit, with “Buy me suckers” written all over it; and some other pretty awesome models (trygon). However, models for some other clearly awesome/popular units were not released for a long time (tervigon) or at all (drop spore, DooM, Tyranid prime); leaving no option but to convert / buy from other retailers (loss of both short and long term profits, as anione using it will already have got the models by the time GW releases them at last).
This seems in direct contradiction with my premises 1 and 2; which means that I’m getting something wrong.
Any ideas?

 dakka farta wrote:

Simply putting it, GW is in the hands of the public (shareholders) not the CEO nor the board, and thats something people forget a lot of the time. And even if some person loyal to the company's current dogma had 51% ownership, we the shareholders could always go for a vote by shareholder, in which the amout of stock a person had would not matter.

 azazel the cat wrote:

Ratliker wrote:So, as far as I understand:
1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits),
at the cost of their games' balance, players' feelings (=lost customers) or whatever (long term profits).
2. They are not dumb. They might be following some perverted form of alien logic of their xenos masters from Zeta-reticuli or whatever, but they are not idiots.

1. Correct.
2. Semi-correct. It's very easy to make the arguent that any business plan that sacrifices long-term profits for short-term profits is not very smart.

 dakka farta wrote:
The manual accreditation programme for directors in my country (malaysia) states that if a sizable amount of minority shareholders are unhappy with the current governing of a company they can vote in a similar way to Cooperatives with each shareholder having one vote. That policy may differ in other countries though.

And Testify i am not saying GW are dumb at all, i am only giving a theoretical way to change the management.

 Kroothawk wrote:
The decisions by Tom Kirby (Chair) and Mark Wells (CEO) don't make sense if you assume they want to maximise the total profit for GW, as profits are basically flat for about 7 years.

 Testify wrote:

 dakka farta wrote:
The manual accreditation programme for directors in my country (malaysia) states that if a sizable amount of minority shareholders are unhappy with the current governing of a company they can vote in a similar way to Cooperatives with each shareholder having one vote. That policy may differ in other countries though.

And Testify i am not saying GW are dumb at all, i am only giving a theoretical way to change the management.

Why do you want to change the management? Especially if they're delivering dividends and can expect to make profit in future.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

davethepak wrote:

I hate to say it, but #2...is actually VERY common at large corporations.
As a strategic business consultant (fancy talk for my job of talking to people disconnected from the realities of what their company is actually doing) I work with a lot of companies, and I see this ALL THE TIME (i.e. I don't work for a single company, I work for dozens of large ones...thus get a lot of exposure to this type of thing).
Many people would say "but that is dumb..." well, yes, it is, but there is a (bad) reason....and here is the cause...its mainly publicly traded companies.

See, in the knee jerk world of quarterly profits and market expectations, companies are constantly trying to jump through hoops to generate good short term numbers..."we need more revenue X this quarter...." often, to the detriment of long term profitability.
Sometimes its just short sighted or bad business sense - other times is just having to focus on short term priorities at the expense of long ones....which ironically is also bad business sense, but sometimes its at least an active choice....

The awful thing about capitalism is that it works

 Kroothawk wrote:
The source is the financial reports by GW. Osbad made a graphic out of it (the burgundy line meandering below 15 Mio GBP, dark blue one being the total revenue in current prices):
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/385538.page


Be aware that every profit is given to the shareholders, including Tom Kirby.
He owns "2,131,394 Ordinary Shares, representing approximately 6.75 per cent. of the issued ordinary share capital of the Company."
http://investor.games-workshop.com/2012/08/10/directorpdmr-shareholding-6/
Earnings per share for the current report 46.8p (2010=36p), so he decided to get 997,492 GBP (2010=767301 GBP) out of company money ... in addition to his salary that was raised by IIRC 10% last year and currently is 352,000 GBP.

Ratliker wrote:1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits)

davethepak wrote:

 azazel the cat wrote:

Ratliker wrote:So, as far as I understand:
1. The aim of the GW is profits NOW (short term profits),
at the cost of their games' balance, players' feelings (=lost customers) or whatever (long term profits).
2. They are not dumb. They might be following some perverted form of alien logic of their xenos masters from Zeta-reticuli or whatever, but they are not idiots.

1. Correct.
2. Semi-correct. It's very easy to make the arguent that any business plan that sacrifices long-term profits for short-term profits is not very smart.

I hate to say it, but #2...is actually VERY common at large corporations.
As a strategic business consultant (fancy talk for my job of talking to people disconnected from the realities of what their company is actually doing) I work with a lot of companies, and I see this ALL THE TIME (i.e. I don't work for a single company, I work for dozens of large ones...thus get a lot of exposure to this type of thing).
Many people would say "but that is dumb..." well, yes, it is, but there is a (bad) reason....and here is the cause...its mainly publicly traded companies.

See, in the knee jerk world of quarterly profits and market expectations, companies are constantly trying to jump through hoops to generate good short term numbers..."we need more revenue X this quarter...." often, to the detriment of long term profitability.
Sometimes its just short sighted or bad business sense - other times is just having to focus on short term priorities at the expense of long ones....which ironically is also bad business sense, but sometimes its at least an active choice....

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program of little plastic men...