The launch of Warhammer 40k 10th edition helped to deliver “the best results in Games Workshop’s history”, according to Games Workshop’s annual report – but will profits recede from this high water mark? The firm has revealed plans to open new stores in North America and Continental Europe, and to bring Warhammer to more parts of East Asia and Latin America, to try and keep up the growth.
Warhammer 40k is, by far, Games Workshop’s most successful IP. The new edition launched in June 2023, with exciting new miniatures for the perennially popular Space Marines. Free rules for the two dozen Warhammer 40k factions, and the simpler Warhammer 40k Combat Patrol game mode, made it an extremely inviting edition of the game for new players. These contributed to GW’s best sales month ever.
GW’s Chief Executive Officer Kevin Rountree states in the firm’s annual financial report for 2023-24 that the launch year for a new edition of 40k is usually a financial highpoint that the firm will struggle to beat until the next edition. He states “we have an ambitious plan for the next period” to try and sustain a trend which has seen “12 out of 12 months of profitable sales growth”. Details of the plan are sprinkled through the annual report.
The firm aims to open “new stores in North America and Continental Europe”, established territories that are not as saturated with Warhammer stores as the firm’s British home turf. GW went from 172 to 185 stores in the US last financial year, and expects to hit 200 stores in North America “soon”. The North America retail team will be “finding a new location for a café format store on the east coast”, though when this will happen isn’t stated.
Both Europe and North America have recently benefited from overhauls to warehousing facilities, and Australia and New Zealand are next. The “next few years” will see GW upgrade “core financial systems and relocate the whole team to a new warehouse and office HQ”.
New territories are also part of the mix. GW will open its first Warhammer stores in Switzerland this year. Rountree states “We expect the majority of our incremental growth to be through sales to independent” stockists. He adds that a “project team led by a veteran export sales manager” aims to open up trade accounts in “more countries across East Asia”, after a successful trip to South Korea.
He adds “we are working with our local distributor in Mexico on an exciting growth plan for Latin America to be delivered in the years ahead”. As we’ve reported in community stories, the costs of imported Warhammer in some countries make the product prohibitively expensive.
GW outlines its approach to supporting Warhammer in new countries. Once sales cross an (unspecified) threshold level, GW will open an “official Warhammer retail store”, offer “a local currency price list, the full core range translated into local language”, marketing support similarly translated, and a locale on Warhammer.com.
There’s currently a job opening for a South Korean translation manager on the GW careers portal, suggesting that South Korea is the next territory to receive this support.
None of this seems revolutionary as growth strategies go, which is just what we expect from Games Workshop. The firm works on a multi-year production planning schedule, and is very slow to turn. While Rountree is a more growth-minded CEO than the business-defining Tom Kirby who held the post until 2015, he has retained the mantra that GW plans to stay in business “forever”.
This isn’t the only news to emerge from the latest Annual Report: we have new information about the proposed Henry Cavill Warhammer film project, which faces a key deadline this December.
Source: Wargamer
