Oh Yeah... GW's Financials Are Out...

by SandWyrm

With all of my preparations for Gencon, and general busy-ness elsewhere, I completely missed when GW released its financials for the year. If you were expecting any sort of big surprise on the financial end, you'll be disappointed. Sales & profits are down a bit (like each of the last few years), and dividends were cut. So you know... Same old same old. Nothing has changed in the long-term trends. Sales are up a little bit in North America & Asia, and down everywhere else. Royalties are back up (covering some for weak sales), and they've somehow found more operational expenses to cut to slightly increase their Operating Profit. Yawn...

The most entertaining bits though, as always, are in the chairman's introductions.

GW Financials: Half-Year 2015

by SandWyrm

Still Treading Water

Well it's that time of year again. GW's half-year financials are out, and as usual it's a somewhat boring decline.

GW Financials: No Huge Surprises

by SandWyrm

Well it's that time of year again, and once more GW has managed to avoid blowing itself up in any sort of carthartic-ly entertaining atomic fireball. Nope, this is the slow grinding decline of mediocrity folks, and the numbers reflect that.

GW's Pre-Financials Statement

by SandWyrm

Had a look over at GW's investor page, and found this unusually informative statement on GW's upcoming financials. Snowmobiled opinions in red.

GW Half-Year Financials: More Of The Same

by SandWyrm

The GW Half-Year numbers are out. The company is still bleeding revenue and profits, though not as badly as they were in June. GW's new CEO, Kevin Roundtree, can at least be given credit for clearly breaking out the numbers for Independent (Trade) Store Sales, GW Retail Sales, and GW Website (Mail Order) Sales. Which are interesting to finally see.

GW Financials: The Rains Of Cash-Still-Here

by SandWyrm

Tom Kirby's wobbly-worded pre-ramble may have set us up to expect the worst from Games Workshop's full-year financial report, but what we actually see today is a slight improvement on the half-year numbers from January. Still bad, to be sure, especially from the standpoint of the institutional investors that they're beholden to (hence Kirby's panic), but nothing particularly catastrophic from the standpoint of the customer base.  Call it a slap in GW's face with a large Tuna, but not a shove over the side of the boat.

GW Financials: Pre-Game Show

by SandWyrm

GW posted a link to their full-year financials today on the investor relations site... Without the link to the report itself. But, I went ahead and checked the public FTP directory where the report would be, and while it isn't there either, there is a published PDF of the chairman's preamble, which is itself both foreboding and somewhat bewildering. Here's a few choice excerpts. Including the announcement that Tom Kirby will be stepping down from the CEO spot next year.

GW's Golden Girls

by SandWyrm

So like most folks, I didn't really 'get' why GW would release a $40.00 copy/paste Sisters Of Battle Codex. One that you could only view on an iPad. Then it hit me. They don't actually expect us to buy it.

GW Financials 2013: The First Five Pages

by SandWyrm

There's been a lot of speculation this year about what's up with GW's sudden explosion of new products. Some folks thought that GW had finally woken up and seen the money that they were leaving on the table. Some others thought that GW must be setting itself up for a sale (or Kirby's retirement); by pumping its numbers up as high as possible. But I took a different view... That GW was just doing what it had to do to prop up flagging sales after the general disappointment of 6th Edition. Turns out, looking at their just-released financial report, I was right.

That's NOT Just The Way It Is

by SandWyrm

Spag I think, speaks for a lot of regular folks when he says that Big Businesses are all the same. It's a fatalistic view, and one that also excuses GW's (and Disney's, and Microsoft's, and Apple's) bad and/or stupid behaviors. But it's just that. Bad/stupid behavior. Which is made worse by the incentives companies have to make bad decisions when they're publicly traded.

The Vice That's Squeezing GW

by SandWyrm

BoLS actually posted an interesting article yesterday. Where they got hold of some fairly candid comments from GW designer Robin Cruddice. Three points stood out to me...

GW Financials: Profit Sources

by SandWyrm

As I look through GW's financial statement, I am finding a few things that don't look quite as rosy as the summaries would have you believe. Let's have a look at one of them.

GW 2012 Financials Posted

by SandWyrm

GW has posted it's year-end financials for 2012. If you were hoping for any sort of dip in their sales/profits, you won't find it here. The numbers look pretty strong. Expenses are down, and profits are up. Particularly in North America, which saw the greatest sales growth of all their regions.