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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ellorghast" data-source="post: 9224764" data-attributes="member: 7043938">Expert here."Making numbers look better" isn't quite the right way to look at it. These layoffs will lead to actual cost savings, which investors like because those drive earnings per share higher. I don't have the document in front of me right now but I think it's something like $100 million by the end of 2025 for this round of cuts, in addition to the $250 million in savings from the original plan that was put into motion last January.The original $250 million in cuts would translate to an extra $1.75 in earnings per share by the end of 2025. For comparison, Hasbro's total EPS for 2022 was $4.45. In 2017, their best year ever by bottom line performance, it was $5.46. So, even with negative organic growth over the next two years, that first round of cuts will probably get them to all-time record earnings per share. The additional $100 million saved by these layoffs would add roughly another $0.70 per share in earnings by the end of 2025.Those numbers are real, they're meaningful, and they're likely to appeal to investors, since they'll drive the stock price up. However, the timing of announcing this now is, to me, suspect, especially since they don't really need those extra savings in order to deliver very solid future results. It feels very much like they're trying to assuage investor concerns over poor performance in the first half of this year and the loss on eOne by offering them even higher returns later, and I think it's reasonable to be concerned that this move may boil down to wooing shareholders over the short term at the expense of the company's long-term health. For most investors, though, that doesn't matter, because when you're talking about trading in stocks, "long term" tends to be, like, five years max. You might end up parking money in a given stock for longer than that, but you wouldn't (or shouldn't) plan on it, since that's about as far ahead as you can reasonably predict a stock's price performance (and even then, it's a stretch).</blockquote>

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