Wonder what the boss received as a bonus for the quarter?
Cocks earned a 2023
base salary of $1.5 million, stock awards and options of roughly $11 million, and nearly $2 million in performance pay, according to the company's (Nasdaq: HAS) 2024 proxy statement.
What he's earning in 2024 we'll see in 2025.
Spawning a mega-hit like BG3 is, optimistically, a once-a-decade occurrence.
And WotC/Hasbro didn't even do that themselves, it was Larian that did it and WotC/Hasbro i surfing on the license fees. That's fine, but looking at how Larian has reacted to WotC/Hasbro, we're not seeing any expansions for BG3 or a BG4 from Larian. And while there are always oodles of fans willing to work for peanuts under bad circumstances, which studio has the money and capability to make a BG3 like game with such success?
Where else would you report the profits or losses of a digital product than under digital sales?
Normally these kinds of income are reported under their own their own category "Licensing", because they can really influence the numbers. Games Workshop does it this way for example.
But the numbers are all there, does the portion of that which is digital sales really matter that much? Isn't the bottom line what is most important?
When the licensing income for just BG3 was $90 million, that's going to seriously skew your digital sales results. That's going to make your digital department look extremely good, while they didn't do anything. And now it's making the digital department look very bad while they didn't do anything.
Did the Hasbro stock drop Friday morning?
It did, but it was already dropping from earlier in the week.
But it's still up from a year ago by ~45%, but ~30% down from 5 years ago (pre-pandemic). The pandemic did initially a significant number on the Hasbro stock value, which they kind of recovered during the pandemic, but post-pandemic they can't keep the numbers up and that's bad, really bad. Especially when you add inflation into the mix, Hasbro investors have seen ~45% of their investment value evaporate, if you add back in dividends over the last 5 years ($15.22 per share), it's still ~30% loss for the investors. Which isn't what you would want to see.
Compare that to Games Workshop for example, there stock went up almost 170% and dividends were also significantly more (15.70GBP), when compensated by inflation, its still +145% profit.
All those hundreds of millions of profit only make rather small dividend payments when you have ~140 million shares and are 'worth' $9.2 billion. The problem with Hasbro/WotC is it's perceived value is not growing, it's declining. When you paid $96 for your share 5 years ago, it's now worth $66, a $1.50 dividend payment for this quarter isn't going to be that much in the big picture. Especially when that money you paid then, is going to buy you almost 25% less goods and services then 5 years ago...
Who in their right mind would buy Hasbro stock at this point? Who in their right mind would work at Hasbro/WotC at this point? Oh, yeah... The fans...
