I am a keen follow of GW financial information and they released their report for last year today. I am really just interested to see how all the things they do that I think are negative to the wargaming hobby and my enjoyment of their products affects them.
Results: Sales Down 123.1M from 126.5M and profit pretty much flat. Remember GW has an annual price rise of like 5% averaged over the whole product line so if they actually had a lose of volume of about 7% again. Not so good. They do not mention the lack of volume growth much. They also claim that everyone had a positive reaction to finecast and got a 97% Quality Control value. This would have to be the level of kits they deemed shippable at production and not the return to store level. I still see plenty of bloggers post about their problems with finecast.
More discussion to come later.
To be fair, FineCast probably IS that fine - but we Bloggers (and the Community in general) are a noisy lot!
ReplyDeleteStill a lack of profit is worrying - and sales dropping again? :/
Explains the rumoured special box in September again - 1-off shot in the arm for sales, hooooooooooooooooo!
They still made a healthy profit of 12 M pounds but it was down from last years 13 M. Interesting they announced that dividends should not always be expected but this year than have about 10M excess cash they they did not have any need for to grow the business (even though the business has contiuned to shrink for 2 years now). I am sure that 10M pounds could buy a copy of people to read the rules and get them tightened up a bit.
ReplyDeleteI'm far from a financial and/or business expert. That being said, GW just needs to get with the times and remold their business model and practice. Such as: make White Dwarf digital or bring back Black Gobbo, visit digital distribution methods for rules and codices, change that piece of shit site so it's geared for hobbyists to drive traffic, etc.
ReplyDeleteI would do their rules tightening for £23k a year.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'd only want that much so I could afford to travel and play 40k all year...