Seibertron wrote:In 2014, did they make approximately $500,000 profit after expenses, salaries, and other expenses related to business, employment, and operating costs? That's not a lot of money all things considered. The ROI seems extremely small. Something about these financial numbers is escaping my understanding at the moment.
I need to go listen to the audio to see if it provides more context. That said, I'd expect this is top line revenue only, in thousands. That's $500 million to Hasbro for the brand in a movie year before
any expenses whatsoever and that sounds about right to me.
Again, I need to go listen to the audio to be sure. Guess I might throw that on while working and come back here after.
Edit: They don't clarify, the slide is just there as an example of how they built a brand through storytelling. Some google searching led me to a figure that Hasbro's Transformers toy revenue from the 2007 movie was $470 million, which lines up with the graph in the presentation. So yeah, revenue to Hasbro from Transformers (in other words, what Hasbro sold themselves, which would be to distributors/retailers,
not what consumers purchased from said channels), was $500 million dollars in 2014.
Exactly what goes into their revenue calc depends on their corporate accounting policies - does it include merchandise returned by distributors? Do they even allow that? Does it account for purchase orders made where payment is expected but not received? We don't know, but here's two takeaways for anyone skimming this post:
1. The numbers shown are not indicative of retail sales figures (the amount of product, in dollars, sold by stores to folks like us, kids, parents, etc.)
2. The numbers shown are not profit.
Hope that helps. These threads always make my head hurt, but this stuff is both boring and not everyone's cup of tea so I try to keep that in mind.