The Energon Pub

Hasbro has been reinventing itself as a company these past 10 years. Under Brian Goldner, the goal was to become a media empire through licence holding, more like Disney. However, the media plans switched, with their movie investments not working out and leading them to sell off their production studio. They are now focusing on becoming a « digital play » focused company under their new CEO, Chris Cocks. These changes in goals are because they feel there is less money to be made in physical toys than before. While that is probably true, there are still a few toylines that are seeing growth and Transformers has been mentioned as one of the rare ones in their recent earnings call for Q3.

While revenue for the company was down 15%, Transformers sales had a 5% increase. Of course its a far cry from the 87% they stated last year, thanks to the Rise of the Beasts toys, but it’s still growth in an overall market that is either stagnant or at loss. The other brands seeing growth are Furby, MLP and Play D’Oh, along with Beyblade which scored the highest growth (71%). We must remember though that unlike Transformers, Hasbro does not own Beyblade.

Nerf suffered losses along with their Star Wars line, which has been a gripe of Hasbro’s for years now, since they also have the license as a sunk cost.

You can read all the details here: https://investor.hasbro.com/static-file ... 3f667c4ecc

Disney's bungling with the Star Wars franchise has spilled over into the toys made by Hasbro, sadly. How much did they sink into making merchandise for Acolyte, which nobody really liked?

Thank God! Don't screw it up Hasbro.

So...they blamed it partly on John Warden since he's part of management? I guess his contributions to boosting TF revenue only got him so far.

Rodimus Prime wrote:So...they blamed it partly on John Warden since he's part of management? I guess his contributions to boosting TF revenue only got him so far.

No, there's no relation with John Warden. Well, there is in this way: while sales are down, profits are not and that's due to them laying off thousands of employees, including John.