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Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

polygon.com

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Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#111

Post by tonfreed »

speeder wrote: post #74
oflannabhra wrote: post #28

Hasbro is essentially upside down, with huge losses across all their brands being subsidized by enormous growth from their subsidiary Wizards of the Coast. Even with that growth, they are significantly down. There was a big investor push recently (led by Alta Fox) to get Hasbro to spin WotC out into an independent company [0], which failed. The big concern being that forcing growth on those properties (Magic: the Gat…

I am a MTG player. Also I used to own my own game business. I am not sure Chris Cocks will preserve wotc. First an interesting fact: one of the people pushing Alta Fox to meddle with Hasbro is a guy that was MTG player in the 90s. Now about Chris Cocks: after he became CEO of WotC, the company did grow but making lots of short term focused things, like ditching the Pro scene, spamming Commander and Modern products (a…

I'm a D&D player, and have definitely noticed a drop in quality of 5e products to the point where I just wasn't interested in buying anything after witchlight. Being a DM, I slurped up every book to steal ideas and encounters that I could use with little effort.

My group also all had the same visceral reaction to the OGL kerfuffle early this year and moved to Pathfinder 2e. I had a lot of fun with 5e, but it had already grown stale for me before all of the madness and short sighted decisions anyway.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#112

Post by hilux »

slimsag wrote: post #78
oflannabhra wrote: post #28

Hasbro is essentially upside down, with huge losses across all their brands being subsidized by enormous growth from their subsidiary Wizards of the Coast. Even with that growth, they are significantly down. There was a big investor push recently (led by Alta Fox) to get Hasbro to spin WotC out into an independent company [0], which failed. The big concern being that forcing growth on those properties (Magic: the Gat…

Hasbro needed to, and failed to (imo), transition into selling higher-end luxury toys for adults with nostalgia - and focus less on kids. With the exception of DnD, everything else Hasbro-owned has failed to capture such an audience I think. Their toys are generally priced ~$25 or less. Higher-end variants of their toys are not by Hasbro, but rather by other companies. Want a high-end nerf gun? You're going to Dart Z…

Lego is a fascinating case study. They've gone entirely corporate - so many of their expensive new products are branded partnerships. I guess it had to be done. There must be an HBS case study, or several, about this.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#113

Post by Consultant32452 »

ska wrote: post #63
azinman2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies do with mass layoffs, yes.

Depending on the jurisdiction, severance packages may be required for mass layoffs.

The WARN act (US federal law) requires that any company with over 100 employees gives 60 days notice. If they don't provide 60 days notice, they are required to give 60 days pay.

Obviously, local laws will vary greatly.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#114

Post by sircastor »

The older I get the more I hate publicly traded stock. Early on it seems like it had a positive advantage for companies, but here in the fully matured market we find that it just screws up all the incentives. Every company imaginable stops being what they are: A computer company, a cookie company, a toy company, an internet provider, a movie studio, etc. They all just turn into a single, stupid thing: A stockholder appeasement company.

Their singular goal becomes making stockholders (more accurately market analysts) look favorably at them. I hate it so much.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#115

Post by hotpotamus »

influx wrote: post #86
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the country in the 80s didn't have a generation of brainwashing by Billionaires, Millionaires, and Temporarily-Displaced-Millionaires parroting the myth that the executive board of a publicly-traded company has a "fiduciary duty" to make as much money as possible.

Did you live through the 80s? I did and find this wildly inaccurate. See the Greed is Good memes and hero worship of Wall Street.

I did not live through the 80's (not the whole decade at least), but I have seen Robocop which I thought was supposed to be a parody. Obviously Alec Baldwin's speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross" is iconic as well.

Even a recent re-watch of "Tommy Boy" really drove home how much of a toll Reagonomics took on the industrial midwest. I never really understood why the man was so revered, but I guess he put on a good act that people bought into.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#116

Post by manuelabeledo »

FredPret wrote: post #98
guyzero wrote: post #85

The price of toys has fallen drastically since 2000. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SERE01 That's got to come straight out of Hasbro's bottom line.

That price decline is absolutely wild. Competition working it's magic.

More like toys are being superseded by other forms of entertainment among the youth.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#117

Post by NohatCoder »

TheGRS wrote: post #62

I feel like a lot of attention from this is on the WotC side, which is doing very well, bully for them, I consume a lot of the D&D product line. But what's up with the rest of the company doing poorly? They have a huge trove of great IP that's failing. Play-doh and Nerf seem like they're still children's play staples no? Is there a big shift in consumption of action figures I should know about? Or is the story more a…

The problem is, nobody cares if the can actually says Play-doh on the label. When kids become brand aware it matters what phone they get, not so much the brand of a toy gun. You can pump them full of commercials to sell stuff, but anyone can do so, and it doesn't matter what your brand used to be before they were born.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#118

Post by hotpotamus »

op00to wrote: post #64
mikeortman wrote: post #14

I have a hunch a lot of companies that layoff in December are also motivated by the bonus structure. Many companies structure their bonus pay around the new year in line with their fiscal calendar, either paying at the beginning of the year or entitling them to the bonus paid out later in the year.

This - I worked at a place that paid bonus quarterly and firings while rare seemed to happen just before the quarter end. Now we are paid bonus yearly and I see firings in December. I think it does align to expenditures like bonus, for sure.

I guess I didn't get dicked too hard in my mid December layoff (a couple years back); they gave me a pro-rated yearly bonus so I only lost like 2 weeks of it. The severance wasn't too bad either so all in all I took my money and shut up like they wanted me to. As I say in all these comments, I just wish that healthcare access wasn't tied to an employer - that seems like the cruelest aspect of modern America. Get too sick to work (and I have a condition that I live with), and you can't get healthcare any more.

Re: Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers

#120

Post by mminer237 »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #105
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~$37M for the execs listed, vs 1100 workers laid off - probably mostly making under $100k. This is one of the rare cases in the layoff discussions where the exec salaries do seem quite excessive. Hasbro had been averaging profits of around ~$250M for the last several years. Paying ~5 people >10% of your profits is INSANE. Continuing to reward them handsomely as your profits drop from ~$250M to -$500M is REALLY INSANE…

Not saying the pay isn't outrageous, but most of the executive pay is in equity, which probably cost Hasbro next to nothing. They can't pay those laid off workers, probably making little more than minimum wage, with that.

Paying in equity still dilutes your stock price therefore increases your loan costs. Plus, you could just sell more stock otherwise.
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