Subject:
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Re: *NEW* LEGO brick-ish Transformers by Hasbro -- What's the deal?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general, lugnet.lego
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Date:
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Mon, 26 May 2003 15:14:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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1442 times
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In lugnet.general, Martin Bruun writes:
> Well, to me a it would be unexpected if Hasbro was about to acquire TLC.
I think it would be a bit unexpected to everybody. And they'd probably
lose a lot of loyal customers if it did happen.
> Some other facts:
> It is not possible to make a hostile take over on TLC as the majority of the
> stocks are held by the Christiansen family and their family foundation
I thought it was a privately owned company, as in no publicly available
stocks at all. Anyways, the way I heard it suggested that Hasbro merely
inquired about the possibility of buying TLC, and they were told to take a
hike. That's a long ways from a hostile takeover (besides, I'm fairly
certain that the US anti-trust laws would kick in if the world's largest toy
company tried to buy the world's third largest toy company, since Hasbro is
located in the US and subject to such laws).
> Then comes the question would it be feasible for Hasbro to pay say 2+ bilion
> $ for a company generating a return on equity of about 6.2%, which perhaps
> would fall to as low as 3.6% if the goodwill is worth 1 bilion $.
I'm also not saying that Hasbro has made the wisest choices possible
when it comes to corporate aquisitions. WotC in particular was a losing
deal for them. They hopped on the PokeCrack train at the end of the run,
and when it came to a rather abrupt stop, they discovered they were
hemmorhaging money (hence the reason WotC was willing to sell). Their
solution was to tell every subcompany that they needed to cut X% of their
staff, but they left it entirely up to the individual companies to decide
how to do that. Again, bad idea when it came to WotC, which was well-known
for the friend-of-a-friend employment policy, so instead of trimming
unnecessary jobs, they basically looked over their IPs, picked the ones that
they weren't very fond of, fired everyone who worked on those IPs (thus
eliminating them as possible sources of income), and _kept_ all the people
whose paychecks were more like personal favors than earned incomes. At this
point, they've got a handful of IPs that are useless to them (since they've
fired everyone who knows what was going on with them), they've still got all
the do-nothing "employees" leeching large chunks of funds in the guise of
paychecks, and Hasbro is really breathing down their neck because they still
aren't all that profitable (this would be part of the problem with only
being able to buy out other companies if they're in financial trouble).
This is the point where Hasbro steps in and tries to fix things, but rather
than hiring everyone back to work on those IPs, they just try to sell them
off (and only the ones worth keeping are worth buying, which leaves them
with all the drek IPs). They then do one thing right, and start firing
everyone who doesn't perform a vital function (salt on the leeches,
anyone?), which is really all they needed to do in the first place. Then
again, if Hasbro was playing it smart about corporate aquisitions, they
wouldn't have gone anywhere near WotC, since it's a well-known fact that the
paper-gaming industry rarely makes anyone rich.
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