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 21:00:02 GMT
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Viewed:
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1701 times
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In lugnet.general, David Laswell writes:
> 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.
I can try and dig up some more detailed info on this, but what I am pretty
sure of is, that the group of companys forming what we in short call TLC
(The Lego Company) is owned by the holding company Lego Holding A/S. The
Lego Holding A/S is then partly owned by Lego-fonden (the Lego Foundation)
and the investment company Kirkbi A/S, which also has the ownership of the
Lego trademarks. Besides that Kirkbi A/S is a financing and investment
company, which invests in many different companys and it is the stocks in
this company that is owned directly by the family, except for a part of it
which is owned by another foundation (Kirkbi-fonden).
So yes, there are no publicly available stocks in TLC. The stocks in TLC are
owned by companys controlled by the family and the foundations.
As a sidenote, it is also the Kirkbi company, which owns the Modulex
company, that produces the smaller lego-like bricks as seen here (sorry in
danish only):
http://www.modulex.dk/servlet/doc?PageID=TSDF-59RBAV
and used in this beatiful mosaic by Eric Harshbarger:
http://www.ericharshbarger.org/lego/calista.html
> 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).
They would probably run into the same kind of problems in Europe too. The
European Union has similar anti-trust laws that applies to companys
operating in the member states if they by merging or acquisitions gains a
dominant position on the toy market.
>
> > 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.
I can hear, that you know a lot more about Hasbro, than I do :-)
Martin
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