Games Workshop 2023-2024 Half-Yearly Financials
Coming off one of their biggest years EVER Games Workshop has released their Half-Yearly Report. Time to check-in and see how they are doing.
Last year was a pretty fantastic year for GW as a company. They’ve got some big shoes to fill. So what do the numbers say? Time to check in with their 2023 Half-Year Report to find out.
via GW’s Investor Relations Page
Excerpts from the Chair:
Kevin Rountree, CEO of Games Workshop, said:
“Games Workshop and the Warhammer hobby are in great shape. We continue to perform well during challenging economic times, delivering record group revenue, profit and dividends in the period. Morale is good at Games Workshop and our hobbyists are having fun too.”
You can read the full report from the links above. We’re going to keep this one pretty high level as well. However, here are some interesting quotes from the report:
We have remained focused on delivering our strategic goal – to make the best fantasy miniatures in the world, to engage and inspire our customers, and to sell our products globally at a profit. We intend to do this forever. Our decisions are focused on long-term success, not short-term gains.
…
AdvertisementLicensing – we own what we believe is some of the best under exploited intellectual property (‘IP’) globally. In the period reported, we have continued to patiently seek partners that can help us fulfil this potential. We will continue to grant licences to carefully chosen partners that respect the need for us to have complete ownership of our unique IP, to ensure no harm is done to the core business: a key risk we highlight every year. We will ensure we do everything we can to make the day to day IP approval process seamless. This process now rests within our Warhammer Studio; with the experts who understand our ambitions and have the IP knowledge.
GW intends to stay in business forever — and they are also looking to leverage their IP with more valuable licensing in the future. There’s quite a bit about the business of licensing in the report that covers future media and video games. In particular the Amazon media deal was mentioned:
As we announced on 18 December 2023, we have signed a contract with Amazon Content Services LLC for the prospective development by Amazon of Warhammer 40,000 universe into films and television series. We remain confident we will bring the worlds of Warhammer to the screen like you have never seen before.
Games Workshop and Amazon will work together for a period of 12 months to agree creative guidelines for the films and television series to be developed by Amazon. The agreement will only proceed once the creative guidelines are mutually agreed between Games Workshop and Amazon.
Another few interesting tidbits involved the My Warhammer and Warhammer+ user base. That service continues to grow for them:
My Warhammer
Registrations for this single login continue to grow at pace and we have 576,000 active users at the period end (2022/23: 346,000) up 66% on prior year. Active users are defined as someone who has engaged with us online in the last six months. My Warhammer is a central part of our customer journey, enabling us to tailor our marketing communications to what our customers are most interested in.Warhammer+
Launched in August 2021, it continues to delight and entertain a growing subscriber base. Our subscriber numbers are 169,000 at the period end (2022/23: 115,000).
Overall, things are looking solid for GW right now. There’s a whole lot of segments in their business that are showing positive growth even as some costs have increased for them. They are moving to have plenty of cash-on-hand and also have invested into more warehousing and manufacturing as well. If this trend continues for the rest of their fiscal year the are looking to be in really good shape for another year.
It’s hard to argue with THOSE numbers…
