Quote: (frogbear @ Nov. 22 2009, 04:29 )
Quote: (javelin98 @ Nov. 22 2009, 13:26 )
or maybe just buy them out.  Notice that GW only picks on smaller fish...
Do you realise just how much GW is worth?
We looked at5 the share price and number of shares the other day. It was scary...
Hasbro will not be buying GW out anytime this or next year at least - and why would they? It is not the best investment....
Actually, they could. We haven't been over this in a while, so I'll recap.
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LSE quotes in pence, so that's 1/100 of a GBP. When you see a quote of 280, that's 2.8 GBP.
Depending on the quoting service, "shares" are sometimes listed in terms of the number of even lots, which is actually 100 shares. When it doubt, you can always go the company and check their last annual report. It will have total outstanding shares.
GW has ~31 million shares but you'll sometimes see ~311K as the total number due to lot count. At ~2.8GBP each, the total market cap (the total of all their share value) of GW is about 85 million GBP. That's about $145 million USD at current exchange rates.
As far as controlling a company ... because many shares are held by institutional investors that don't vote and small investors that don't vote, controlling interest (that means enough to do pretty much anything you like) can generally be had around 20%. However, for small companies like GW the company executives often control an unusually large share. That can both increase the percent of share required and reduce the number of shares available on the open market, both of which makes a hostile takeover more difficult.
However, even allowing for that, $50-60 million US would probably succeed in a hostile takeover of GW and then once the price settled, another $120-150 would finish the buyout.
Hasbro could start that tomorrow if they wanted.
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With respect to the quality of investment, GW's P/E ratio (price to earnings) is about 15. That means they are earning about 6% of their market cap. That's not great but it's not heinous.
If a large company really thought that GW products could make it mainstream, something like Hasbro's distribution system and larger-scale production could make for some serious economies of scale. Personally, I think that would not work because GW is a niche company, but I'm not an expert in the mass-market toy industry and don't know if they could be transitioned to mass market.
I'd be less surprised to see something like the CCP buyout of White Wolf, where a computer company basically bought them just to get access to the fictional universe IP. But I could be completely wrong on that as well.
