Games Workshop 2019-2020 Financials

COVID-19

“As the pandemic developed in the year reported on, we assessed the potential impact on our staff, their families and our customers and closed the business globally on 24 March 2020. We could not guarantee that we could operate by following government guidelines. Most of our business is now recovering and some staff continue to work from home. There is potential for further disruption, so we will continue to monitor the impact and do what is necessary to ensure our staff, their families and our customers are safe. This is, and will remain, at the forefront of our minds.

I am not going to go into too much detail on the impact of COVID-19 on the business. In summary, after an incredible team performance, we only lost c. six weeks of sales and profit. Our retail channel was hardest hit and has taken longer to recover; fully adhering to government guidelines regarding the opening of non-essential stores. We initially claimed furlough relief and other governmental support, which we are in the process of repaying in full, where possible….”

We continue to be customer focused, keeping them at the forefront of all we do and the decisions we make. In return, our customers have never been more engaged – reading and interacting with more Warhammer content, more often than ever before. Warhammer- community.com, the cornerstone of our online presence, had over 145 million page views in the year, more than 30% growth on the previous year. This is from over 8 million users, up almost 40% from last year. In the year, we further increased our social media presence with all of our channels growing.

We’ve also continued to support sales in our retail stores, with promotions, activities and seasonal themes. One of the most exciting of these last year was the Everchosen global Warhammer painting competition. Everchosen was the first of its kind and saw tens of thousands of Warhammer fans enter their lovingly painted miniatures at thousands of venues around the world, including at over 500 of our official Warhammer stores.

Despite the challenges and restrictions of COVID-19, the team managed to unite people around the world through the enjoyment and escapism that Warhammer brings. With physical spaces closed and events cancelled, they streamed content live to thousands of viewers every day. This culminated in the announcement of the new edition of Warhammer 40,000. The online event achieved 4 million reach in less than 24 hours, and saw Warhammer trend on social media and video platforms. At the time of writing, the Warhammer 40,000 trailer has been watched more than 2 million times. This was, by orders of magnitude, the most successful announcement in Games Workshop’s history.”

“We have made some progress, as expected it is a little slower than I’d like – hey ho. We have signed the co-development agreement with Big Light Productions and are in the final stages of developing the project for the TV market: a story based on one of our most popular Black Library novel series, Eisenhorn. We are in discussions with other companies regarding other media projects, both live action and animation, all over the world. To help, we are strengthening the team by recruiting a few professionals from the media industry to assist with progress. It is truly an exciting time. I can’t wait to see the outcome of this work.

Licensing

Our goal is AAA video games. We have signed multiple licences and we continue to negotiate many more, we will update you once they are announced. At the time of writing, we have 73 licences and are signing new ones every 2-3 months.”