Written by Mattel and Hasbro raised a few eyebrows when they entered a multi-year partnership last year to create co-branded toys and games.
When Hasbro created a Barbie branded Monopoly game and Mattel produced a Transformers branded UNO game, the two toy competitors fiercely competing over customers and licensing properties like ” Disney’s Frozen” suddenly felt like a distant memory.
Well now it seems Hasbro is contemplating making a move to acquire Mattel. Per the reports by industry analysts like Reuters and Market Watch, a private-equity firm called L Catterton has approached Mattel (the toy company behind “Masters of the Universe“) with an offer to purchase Mattel. And now, apparently Hasbro is also considering getting in the game.
Reports suggest that Hasbro Inc. was aware about L Catterton making an offer to buy Mattel and is “weighing whether to make its own offer, potentially marking the latest attempt at a tie-up between the two companies.”[Hasbro & Mattel]
Market Watch indicated that previous efforts by the two big toy rival companies [Hasbro & Mattel] to combine in past decades “failed to materialize. However, Weiser on Monday said Hasbro’s stock valuation over Mattel’s was “perhaps the highest we have seen in our years covering the two stocks. With Hasbro’s leveraged balance sheet, it would have to use stock in a proposed takeover of [Mattel].”
Reuters‘ sources warned there was no certainty L Catterton’s offer will push Mattel into exploring a sale by the private-equity firm or Hasbro for that matter, and all three companies would not comment on the matter other than Mattel saying “We are very confident in Mattel’s strategy and our ability to create long-term shareholder value as a standalone company.“
We just have to wait and see what happens (if anything). We’ll see you next time.
The question is would that be good for us or bad for us.
Speaking as a MTG fan. Awful. Absolutely fucking dreadful. Hasbro will milk all the Mattel franchises until there’s nothing left. I pray this never ends up happening.
This would be a disaster, hasbro has been circling the drain for years and I’d hate for MOTU to go down with it. Even if the company was in good health the quality control is garbage-hasbro lost the Jurassic World license because the toys were so bad.
GTFO WITH THAT
I assume Hasbro would survive the merger. Presumably, the bulk of the Mattel departments would stay working on whatever they were already working on, but Hasbro managers would replace the Mattel ones. Might be a factory shift as well.
Not sure we’d see a ton of change, really, though Hasbro does seem more interested in using its properties for multimedia purposes.
As much as we love MOTU here, the real jewels in the crown would be Barbie and Hot Wheels.
Having seen these kind of mergers in the book publishing world, and its effects on the staff and on the consumers, there’s absolutely no advantage or positives about that. Nothing.
I am really really not sure how to feel about this. I do know that Hasbro took a huge loss and is shifting back to core toys. The Multimedia aspects and other property deals are being lost. I don’t want Masters to get hurt in this if anything does go down.
Hasbro’s distribution on Power Ranger has been worse than Origins and Masterverse. Imagining the crossovers is great but actually finding the figures would be a nightmare
@darkliger but how much of this is on stores not ordering/re-ordering? If this was still peak covid I’d say distribution but the stores just seem lazy
@brasco I honestly don’t know. But when the picking are almost non existent at every store in the county it raises questions
A merger of the two largest toy companies would likely be blocked by the FTC.
I doubt Hasbro are in any position to buy Mattel. They’re still smarting from losing billions on eOne, they’re trying to break into video games just as those seem to be crashing, and sales of everything they make are in various stages of decline with the exception of maybe Classified. You only have to look at Transformers to see how badly they’ve slashed the budget and they’ve already said they’ll be using cheaper materials across their product lines.
The best I could say for them is they’re a lot better at distribution. But then there’s plants better at distribution than Mattel!
@sketchyskeletor Got any links regarding video game sales crashing? I’m curious. And what’s going on with Transformers?
I don’t think it’s the individual games themselves crashing so much as the industry – countless layoffs in American and European studios every week and apparently the sales of the big two’s hardware are down, but Microsoft wasn’t kidding when they said in that Activision court case they were barely in the race!
With regards to Transformers they’ve been endlessly rereleasing figures, like even the ones Ollies got! Things like G2 Prime, Strongarm, stuff that bombed hard or at least was massively overproduced originally is back out again.
Here in the UK at least our biggest game retailer (GAME) has morphed into a merch store with games as a side hustle. And Hasbro have been offloading their low quality Transformers crap or reproduced crap onto them so often our bigger independent etailers are openly calling them out on their Facebook pages. We’re seeing offers on CASELOADS and bundles of deluxes, voyagers and leaders Transformers. It’s almost the same deal with Marvel Legends. Buyers have been conditioned to wait on a sale because right now you can buy a Marvel Legends 60th anniversary 2 pack for £15, for instance.