Knock it off with these incessant Town Hall meeting. Do you realise how demoralizing it is to listen to you talk about the business? Or at least next time, maybe try and pretend to give a sht about the things coming out of your mouth. Go back and watch today's presentation and tell us how inspired you feel afterwards. WONDER how long this can continue.
14 replies (most recent on top)
Yes let the wildlings run the place. That will solve things. The company needs more emotionally scarred narrow minded bottom dwellers to take the reins. Who'll likely end up fighting amongst yourselves over petty imagined hurt and insults. By all means let's do this. Mob rule always works.
There's NO WONDER here why the company is failing. Lack of leadership. Lack of competence. Flush out all the VP's and higher. They're all politicans. No place in the business.
RIP Mattel. 2018 is the end.
I still blame upper mismanagement for this decline for several reasons. OK, Barbie sales/revenue/ profits are down but it certainly didn't help their stupid arrogant decision to launch Never After High which was a just pissing match between two SVP's on the Girls side which then cost them losing Frozen. Wow, a huge loss but upper mismanagement said it was no big deal, no worries. Then, they screw the pooch by totally mismanaging Monster High which is what started said pissing match in the first place.
Then again they mismanage the DPCars Line by switching out the Design team that actually built it into an evergreen Line a year after the Cars Line was dormant and generated hundreds of millions of dollars for 5 years. Cars 2 comes out and the new team screws the pooch with over priced cost reduced crap product. There was also a small International evergreen Line known as Max Steel which had existed for 15 years, not a big line but actually got up to 100mm which is now basically dead.
You keep seeing this said in this blog, stupidity, arrogance, & greed goes rewarded here @ MattHell.
You people are ridiculous. To figure out why Mattel is in the bad shape it's in, just look at the annual report (it's free BTW on-line). Mattel's margin has dropped by over 5% and it's revenue has dropped over $1 billion. It's not because of management salaries and parachute packages. It's because we've lost our leadership position in fashion dolls and can't get it back.
Fashion doll margins are almost TWICE what all the other brands deliver. Fashion dolls SUBSIDIZE the bottom line profit of Mattel. If revenue goes down, it means there are a lot less fashion dolls being sold. That then means the size of the subsidy is dramatically reduced against the rest of the business, and the margin percentage drops.
The stock price rises and falls based on revenue and margin - nothing else. The only way to restore back to acceptable levels of margin % and revenue is to dramatically increase sales by $1 billion with products that make as much margin as fashion dolls. Guess how many categories and companies can offer that? There's only one - LEGO - and mattel isn't in a position to acquire a company that large and profitable.
SO the answer then is.......................the company CANNOT possibly return to profitability. Barbie has lost HALF of it's revenue in the last 10 years, with no plan or hope of increasing. Even if there was a blockbuster movie to temporarily lift the brand, it will not last long and will not reset the baseline. This is all because of short-sighted leadership from the Board of Directors only interested in keeping the dividend in tact. Too late, the new CEO has cut it, but it will need to be eliminated in order to take every penny and re-engineer the company to not be so reliant on one category (fashion dolls) as it has.
Mattel has stayed at the party too long and now it's time to go home.
When the company is on death's door you can justify a premium. That is what she did. It's the cost of being in trouble.
@1cby - oh, yes - she needs and she wants money - if this was so noble she would not have negotiated such a great package. it's always about the money. and ego. and then, maybe some legacy.
Does anyone like to deliver bad news? Would you have excoriated her if she didn't try to give us an update? Most likely. You can't put lipstick on the pig here. Yes she makes a lot of money. But do you really think she needed this job? She's got google money. She's set. She wants a legacy. And that's not a legacy of failure. It's easy to abdicate responsibility to others and whine. It's a lot harder to help try to fix it. Will it work or get fixed? I don't have a crystal ball for that. The problems may be too deep. But there are actually people like her who haven't given up on even your negative a$$e$.
The content of her remarks suggests her intention is to give a rousing inspirational speech but her delivery is just so dull its hard to even follow.
Less demoralizing and more just boring. The woman is like a walking, talking Ambien pill.
Hi previous poster. Yes, the CEO does realize how demoralizing their silly town hall meetings are. It Is how the elite entertain themselves. When you get paid gobs of money even to fail, you spend your time holding a magnifying glass above a bug on a hot day just to watch it squirm and suffer. Such good fun! Boycott the meetings, it is the best you can do. Narcissists NEED an audience. Don't give them one.
Let me tell you what will happen here - she'll pull a Marissa Mayer on us here - will stick around for about 2 to 3 years, will wreak havoc and will bail with god-knows-how-many millions when the dust settles.
The issues we have are structural and no person can turn this ship around - things are going digital and we are not and will never be a digital company.
*Could NOT agree more :)
I could agree more. I feel like the honeymoon is officially over.