The Energon Pub

[fenrir72]

https://seekingalpha.com/article/408662 ... -gunsights

by Lutz Muller


Summary

Takara Tomy is losing one of its best licenses (Pokemon), and its revenue outlook is negative for the next two years.

The company has failed in its effort over the past six years to diversify from a declining Japanese toy market.

The company has incurred massive losses since 2012.

It has hence become a takeover target and this possibly from the side of Hasbro

[Jelze Bunnycat]

We can't read the whole article (5 pages) without registering for the site, which I'm totally against.

And it sounds like pure conjecture to me, to influence stock brokers. I don't see Hasbro taking over TakaraTomy given the special relationship they have, has Hasbro even bought out companies that are based outside of the US?

[ScottyP]

It'd certainly make business sense, but from a personal standpoint I could also see this being the end of a lot of things we've known and loved for years. Having Takara's options and various ancillary lines available that wouldn't be feasible here has given the hobby some depth and character that is sometimes sorely lacking.

Goose and gander and all that, but I have to admit this would be a major blow to my interest in the toys if it made Takara's side of things disappear.

[Va'al]

A preamble before the write-up: the original article is entirely speculative, and given that it was originally posted in July 2017 and we have heard nothing from either Hasbro or Takara Tomy since, please only consider it as such - speculation.

With that out of the way, you may be interested in reading an analysis over on SeekingAlpha concerning rumours of Hasbro acquiring Takara Tomy as part of itself (rather than the current partnerships they operate on certain franchises, such as Transformers), after Takara Tomy lost the license to one of its more lucrative products: Pokémon. The full piece is behind a register-to-read wall, but you can read the summary and the opening paragraphs below.

What do you make of this potential, but not at all confirmed or suggested anywhere else, circumstance? Would you be happy with the change? Let us know in the Energon Pub!

Summary

• Takara Tomy is losing one of its best licenses, and its revenue outlook is negative for the next two years.
  
• The company has failed in its effort over the past six years to diversify from a declining Japanese toy market.
  
• The company has incurred massive losses since 2012.
  
• It has hence become a takeover target and this possibly from the side of Hasbro.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with an old friend of mine, a senior buyer at a large Japanese toy retailer, who asked me whether I had seen the announcement about Pokemon pulling its license from Takara Tomy (OTC:TKHIY) and giving it to Wicked Cool Toys Company as of July 2018. I said that I had, and the follow-up question was whether I thought it likely that one of the two large American toy companies would buy Takara Tomy. Japanese executives are not in the habit of asking flippant questions, and this one made me think that there could in fact something major be happening and meriting further investigation.

First, some background.

In a Toy News Magazine article dated April 6, 2011, I said that:

“Takara Tomy is buying RC2 and challenging the leading US and European toy manufacturers on their own turf. With this move the company is transforming itself from a local giant into one with a decent presence in all major markets and a viable competitor to Mattel, Spin Master and JAKKS. I have omitted Hasbro from that statement because there are ties between the two companies effectively ruling out competition between them.”

There was a solid reason why Takara Tomy was anxious to diversify away from its home market. Japan toy sales have been declining for since 2010 due to negative population growth, a trend that is unlikely to reverse itself in a hurry:

[xMXUx]

I'm with ScottyP here. If were to acquire I could totally see them releasing only one version of their figures for the entire world for cost cutting reasons. And that would blow immensely.
But since this is all pure speculation, I'm hoping everything stays the same, at least for the foreseeable future

[Ironhidensh]

If it happened, that would be the end of the Masterpiece line.

[Actar]

Transformers is dead if that happens.

[fenrir72]

So to all the lugnuts complaining of skyrocketing prices.........Takara is still hurting and bad!Buy at retail or they die.

If Hb does a friendly take over, well who knows what happens next? They are friends I hope.

At least this gives the uninformed some idea on why or how the prices are at times waaaaaaaaay out there or why the plastics are hollow, molds reused etc etc.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand the Japanese aren't making anymore babies , well, not enough to be the future targets for Takara's products. It's probably US adults who are the main consumer base (the Japanese adults especially) and some in the international community now who are giving Takara ACLS.

[Saminus9000]

*sign* if this happens Hasbro will destroy the entire Masterpiece Movie series before it even started. Either they'll take control on who could be next for release which is the LAST thing we want because all they'll end up giving us is different versions of bumblebee or let their poopy designer (john warden) take over on making them.


TakaraTomy has always taken the initiative of servicing their fans and giving us the best quality of their toys while Hasbro hid in the shadows looking after themselves and constantly neglecting us.

[ScottyP]

If Hb does a friendly take over, well who knows what happens next? They are friends I hope.

I would imagine two possibilities, one being that TT essentially ceases to exist with Hasbro making any determination on what happens to the personnel and capital resources. The other would be something like what happened with Kenner, where the branding might get used on selected items (hi there, Movie Masterpiece!)

One thing for certain is that if anything happens, it'll be complicated. Mergers and acquisitions are often the most complex corporate reorganization events, and just the legal process to determine what happens with the underlying securities comprising companies can take months. As this is two companies on different sides of the globe, it gets even trickier!

[ScottyP]

TakaraTomy has always taken the initiative of servicing their fans and giving us the best quality of their toys while Hasbro hid in the shadows looking after themselves and constantly neglecting us.

Hasbro watched from the shadows while Takara serviced us? I thought that was a private moment.

[Randomhero]

I love all this ridiculousness. End of masterpiece, end of retools in Legends etc. it reminds me of when Disney acquired Marvel and when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and people freaking out thinking things were just gonna get worse and it didn’t.

If Hasbro acquired Takara tajara woudlnt disappear or lose stuff. They would just be able to have Hasbro’s backing and funding on stuff to sell their stuff. That’s what happens with a lot of these things.

[Randomhero]

*sign* if this happens Hasbro will destroy the entire Masterpiece Movie series before it even started. Either they'll take control on who could be next for release which is the LAST thing we want because all they'll end up giving us is different versions of bumblebee or let their poopy designer (john warden) take over on making them.


TakaraTomy has always taken the initiative of servicing their fans and giving us the best quality of their toys while Hasbro hid in the shadows looking after themselves and constantly neglecting us.

Yeah you believe that but it’s not a heading of Takara maybe acquiring Hasbro dude. If you really wanna believe Takara cares about you so much while Hasbro doesn’t than look where that got them.

[Randomhero]

I love it when people say Hasbro doesn’t care about fans while 95% of 84-87 has been remade with modern day engineering and 3 two foot tall city bots that have been made. It’s just sad and embarrassing

[TulioDude]

I love it when people say Hasbro doesn’t care about fans while 95% of 84-87 has been remade with modern day engineering and 3 two foot tall city bots that have been made. It’s just sad and embarrassing

[Rated X]

Im down with a one size fits all worldwide deco if it means "platinum" style figures for everyone and the death of the el cheapo Has-deco. No more off white and grey plastic and non painted hubcaps are a good thing. No more ridiculous prices for 50 cents worth of extra paint is also a good thing. As the Franchise ages and starts to gear more towards lifelong adult fans rather than kids, Hasbro might be influenced by the Japanese to make stuff more collector oriented and gimmick free. The transformers franchise needs more Japanese influence and less influence from corporate middle America.

[Ironhidensh]

Im down with a one size fits all worldwide deco if it means "platinum" style figures for everyone and the death of the el cheapo Has-deco. No more off white and grey plastic and non painted hubcaps are a good thing. No more ridiculous prices for 50 cents worth of extra paint is also a good thing. As the Franchise ages and starts to gear more towards lifelong adult fans rather than kids, Hasbro might be influenced by the Japanese to make stuff more collector oriented and gimmick free. The transformers franchise needs more Japanese influence and less influence from corporate middle America.

History and peri encephalitis teach that corporate interests always win.

I get it. Hasbro has little interest in making anything that doesn't have mass market sellability, at as little cost as possible.

The collector community simply isn't large enough to really matter. Oh well, at least we will still have the 3rd party market.

[Randomhero]

Im down with a one size fits all worldwide deco if it means "platinum" style figures for everyone and the death of the el cheapo Has-deco. No more off white and grey plastic and non painted hubcaps are a good thing. No more ridiculous prices for 50 cents worth of extra paint is also a good thing. As the Franchise ages and starts to gear more towards lifelong adult fans rather than kids, Hasbro might be influenced by the Japanese to make stuff more collector oriented and gimmick free. The transformers franchise needs more Japanese influence and less influence from corporate middle America.

If takara profits are down like it’s said why the Hell would Hasbro acquire them and say “hey let’s do what they’re doing and focus on grown men who don’t grow up instead of focusing on the broadest audience which kids.” There’s a reason there’s posts every year that shows Hasbro increases every year it ain’t the 20-40 fans that buy toys.

Does nobody here have kids or shop in public? Doe everyone here just click a mouse and have their stuff delivered becuase they’re too sheltered in their home and embarrassed to buy toys in public. Sorry but my best friend is 31 and only shops online becuase he doesn’t like complete strangers seeing him buy toys. I know that’s a thing.

We are not the majority. I’m sorry if you can’t comprehend that but takara focusing on collectors is probably where they got to where they are with this. Doing insanely overpriced takara Mall exclusives, only putting out 20-30 figures a year with transformers and purposely ignoring certain molds becuase they don’t have a backstory from 30 years ago -cough took 2 years to release generations skids cough-

Hasbro’s primary focus is kids. We are the bonus.

[Hydrargyrus]

All that would happen is Takara would have more money.
Take, for example, another instance (sorry for the out-of-the-blue comparison) when Minecraft (Mojang?) was acquired by Microsoft. Nothing really happened.
When a company buys another, the latter does not become obliterated and morph into the other. It continues to run, mostly as normal, and some money stuff happens. It'll all be fine. We're running 35+ years and strong, and we haven't lost quality products yet.

[EDIT]:

I love all this ridiculousness. End of masterpiece, end of retools in Legends etc. it reminds me of when Disney acquired Marvel and when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and people freaking out thinking things were just gonna get worse and it didn’t.

If Hasbro acquired Takara tajara woudlnt disappear or lose stuff. They would just be able to have Hasbro’s backing and funding on stuff to sell their stuff. That’s what happens with a lot of these things.

Like this.

[Evil Eye]

Let's seriously hope this isn't happening. If it went ahead we'd have no "not completely crap but a bit more expensive" choice- it'd be Hasbro's underpainted figures with poorly applied stickers and no elbows or nothing. The MP line would either disappear completely or go to sh!t. And if this DID happen then Transformers as a brand would probably go under fairly quickly (contrary to popular belief, the collector market is bigger than most realize; 20% of Hasbro's TF profits are from collectors, and whilst that doesn't sound like much, it is a LOT of money from a company's perspective. Collectors abandoning the line would probably destroy Transformers completely, as the sharp fall in profits would cause the imbeciles in charge at Hasbro to cut back on the kid-oriented stuff, to the point quality would fall so low that even kids would begin to get sick of it.

Fiction would probably suffer too. With the brand entirely owned by an American company we'd most likely lose out on all Japanese influence on the fiction (no chance of that Trigger-produced anime I dream of) and the fiction would probably fall in line with the likes of modern Marvel; that is, pandering to people who don't even buy the things they want to change, and excluding the existing fanbase.

On the plus side, if this did happen, Hasbro might sell the brand to someone else with an actual idea of what they're doing. And who knows, the death of collector-oriented mainline toys might mean we see a return of CHUG scaled stuff in the 3P realm again.

I mean, I highly doubt this will happen, as this is an article from July and nothing has happened since then, but if it does, the Transformers might finally shed itself of the ball and chain that is Hasbro and their incompetence.

[Carnivius_Prime]

I love all this ridiculousness. End of masterpiece, end of retools in Legends etc. it reminds me of when Disney acquired Marvel and when Disney acquired Lucasfilm and people freaking out thinking things were just gonna get worse and it didn’t.

Eh I dunno. I've certainy found most Marvel and Star Wars stuff to have gotten worse since Disney took over. As bad as I thought the prequels were, The Force Awakens just felt like a huge insult and Marvel's comics have gotten crappier and crappier.
Not saying Disney fault but those aren't shining examples of quality in my opinion

[Randomhero]

Let's seriously hope this isn't happening. If it went ahead we'd have no "not completely crap but a bit more expensive" choice- it'd be Hasbro's underpainted figures with poorly applied stickers and no elbows or nothing. The MP line would either disappear completely or go to sh!t. And if this DID happen then Transformers as a brand would probably go under fairly quickly (contrary to popular belief, the collector market is bigger than most realize; 20% of Hasbro's TF profits are from collectors, and whilst that doesn't sound like much, it is a LOT of money from a company's perspective. Collectors abandoning the line would probably destroy Transformers completely, as the sharp fall in profits would cause the imbeciles in charge at Hasbro to cut back on the kid-oriented stuff, to the point quality would fall so low that even kids would begin to get sick of it.

Fiction would probably suffer too. With the brand entirely owned by an American company we'd most likely lose out on all Japanese influence on the fiction (no chance of that Trigger-produced anime I dream of) and the fiction would probably fall in line with the likes of modern Marvel; that is, pandering to people who don't even buy the things they want to change, and excluding the existing fanbase.

On the plus side, if this did happen, Hasbro might sell the brand to someone else with an actual idea of what they're doing. And who knows, the death of collector-oriented mainline toys might mean we see a return of CHUG scaled stuff in the 3P realm again.

I mean, I highly doubt this will happen, as this is an article from July and nothing has happened since then, but if it does, the Transformers might finally shed itself of the ball and chain that is Hasbro and their incompetence.

Let’s travel back to 2001 when takara was primarily in control the brand. We got the Unicron trilogy. We got toys that purposely pulled back on articulation like knees and elbows and such with Hasbro asking for certain things included and ignored by takara. Hasbro had to tell takara they wanted Unicron included and takara refused until they final gave in. That was a Hasbro thing. Hasbro is the reason we got that ginormous Unicron that turns into an actual planet and holds all the Minicons.

Let’s talk about animation. Again the Unicron trilogy. Takara was in control and wasn’t wanting to work with Hasbro. The animation was a huge step back and to boot was just sending them episodes without scripts. The American team had to figure out what the hell was going on half the time and rush to get them dubbed and put out. Same thing happened with Energon and is regarded as the worst cartoon ever made becuase of how awful it was done with bad animation and story telling. Again takara not communicating or even sending scripts. Get to cybertron and takara just full on ignored Hasbro and made the show a non continuation of Energon. They just made it a new show which forced Hasbro to add animation of Unicron debris throughout to make it a trilogy and explained stuff.


You really wanna say it’d get worse with Hasbro in control? After the Unicron trilogy we got animated and the aligned universe. You know what takara did to those? They made animated a continuation of the live action movie and turned Bulkhead into Ironhide from the movies and omitted pivotal episodes out becuase japan doesn’t like western show lengths.

Same with prime. Takara just gave up in Prime. Season three and predacons rising was never released so the show in Japan legitimately ended with the autobot base being destroyed and Optimus looking like he died and the autobots lost.

Really wanna day things would be worse with Hasbro in control? Some of us went through takara leadinng the charge and it wasn’t a fun ride.

[Randomhero]

Double post. Derp

[Saminus9000]

Let's seriously hope this isn't happening. If it went ahead we'd have no "not completely crap but a bit more expensive" choice- it'd be Hasbro's underpainted figures with poorly applied stickers and no elbows or nothing. The MP line would either disappear completely or go to sh!t. And if this DID happen then Transformers as a brand would probably go under fairly quickly (contrary to popular belief, the collector market is bigger than most realize; 20% of Hasbro's TF profits are from collectors, and whilst that doesn't sound like much, it is a LOT of money from a company's perspective. Collectors abandoning the line would probably destroy Transformers completely, as the sharp fall in profits would cause the imbeciles in charge at Hasbro to cut back on the kid-oriented stuff, to the point quality would fall so low that even kids would begin to get sick of it.

Fiction would probably suffer too. With the brand entirely owned by an American company we'd most likely lose out on all Japanese influence on the fiction (no chance of that Trigger-produced anime I dream of) and the fiction would probably fall in line with the likes of modern Marvel; that is, pandering to people who don't even buy the things they want to change, and excluding the existing fanbase.

On the plus side, if this did happen, Hasbro might sell the brand to someone else with an actual idea of what they're doing. And who knows, the death of collector-oriented mainline toys might mean we see a return of CHUG scaled stuff in the 3P realm again.

I mean, I highly doubt this will happen, as this is an article from July and nothing has happened since then, but if it does, the Transformers might finally shed itself of the ball and chain that is Hasbro and their incompetence.

I really hope Takara picks a different course of action

[ArmadaPrime]

Man, much as I don't think it will happen , even less do I think it would be as dramatic is some seem to think. Whilst losing Pokémon is pretty huge for TT (and a total surprise to me, honestly) it's far from the case that Transformers is now their only line. There's no reason to assume Hasbro would be much more than a sleeping investor- the Disney/Marvel, Disney/Lucas, and Microsoft/Minecraft parallels have been raised already (though apparently there's paid dlc on Minecraft for xbox, which can only be Microsoft's nonsense idea).
It would be more work I think to fully integrate the two markets, especially as:
-most stuff is designed collaboratively anyway
-most stuff is even produced in the same factories or so I gather
-the markets themselves are very different. Perhaps it comes as a surprise to some, but the primary market of TT isn't "western collectors with a bit more money than other western collectors"