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GW doing well in 2016

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 4:55 pm
by RE.Lee
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/201 ... g_share_tw

GW seems to be in good shape, financially.

This is not that surprising, given they finally started selling decent bundles and things people wanted. One can only wonder what the results would have been had they done the same for WFB.

Re: GW doing well in 2016

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2017 6:56 pm
by Shannar, Sealord
I think Brexit did them a big favor. That and video games, it was a great year for GW video games.

Bundles surely played a role, but I suspect that it's smaller than the role played by the decline in the pound and game royalties.

Re: GW doing well in 2016

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2017 9:36 pm
by SpellArcher
Shannar, Sealord wrote:decline in the pound
How much cheaper is their stuff now in real terms would you guess Shannar?

Re: GW doing well in 2016

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2017 10:20 pm
by Shannar, Sealord
It's hard to say, because I'm not sure they adjusted prices accordingly on their websites. They do seem to have adjusted them in terms of what they charge independent stores though, because they seem to be passing better prices on. In the US I'd roughly guess that it's been worth another 10% or so. Not huge, but not insignificant either.

Re: GW doing well in 2016

Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2017 8:14 am
by Prince of Spires
Shannar, Sealord wrote:I think Brexit did them a big favor. That and video games, it was a great year for GW video games.

Bundles surely played a role, but I suspect that it's smaller than the role played by the decline in the pound and game royalties.
This is actually the kind of information GW can't (easily) hide. Since they their (half year) results for investors, we can put a number on these.

Total pre-tax profit: £13.8m vs £6.3m last year
Royalties: £3.3m vs £1.5m last year
Revenue: £70.9m vs £55.3m last year
Revenue at constant currency: £62.7m vs £55.3m last year

So royalties indeed more then doubled (I'm guessing mainly Total war), but they are still only about 1/6th of the total profit, which is actually less (% wise) then the 1/4 it was last year.
Revenue was up 7 million (in constant currency), so even without the drop of the pound there is growth. Margins also increased at the same time (which is probably in part due to the drop of the pound) by about 4%, which probably accounts for another 2,8 million profit. But if we factor this in then pound and royalties only account for 4.5 of the 7.5million increase in profit. So they still managed to increase profits by 3 million on their own, still a respectable 50% increase.

It should be noted that (from what I can see in the half year report) about half of that increase is due to "Non-core" sales, which is anything that is not directly related to the game AoS, 40k or LotR. In this case mainly Blood Bowl and a new form factor for White Dwarf. It should always be seen if they can repeat this next year (though they're planning on it).

It's hard to find an easy overview of the financial history of GW (I don't feel like browsing through 5 different reports and I can't find an easy overview of the past few years). But they definitely seem to be doing better then in the past few years.

Rod

Re: GW doing well in 2016

Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2017 9:38 am
by Shannar, Sealord
Revenue was up 7 million (in constant currency), so even without the drop of the pound there is growth.
Yes, but that revenue will come at least in part from an increase in total number of sales that come from more reasonable prices. Everyone outside the UK should have seen some effect of that. It's still nothing but good news for GW, and anyone bought something they'd been on the fence on because it was more affordable now might even turn it back into a habit.

I forgot about Blood Bowl. That's probably doing really well. We decided not to bother because of the size change. But at some point a few of us will give in and get at least the rules.