Thread regarding Mattel Inc. layoffs

what i want to know is how does anyone expect this company to turn around when it’s being run by motherless hags and butt pirates? they know nothing about children.

Thanks - that explanation helped. Just surprised people suddenly optimistic after stock was at 13 in summer. Not seeing evidence company is turning around and board keeps rejecting hasbro takeovers.

Three ways you could interpret it, one being that investors believe in the CEO's premise that in 17 we hit rock bottom and can have a clean slate going into this year or they see Q4 results at a confirmation that the long awaited turnaround is never going to materialise and they're buying up cheap MAT stock now before the inevitable buyout from either Hasbro or someone else. The third possibility is that investors are just clueless and are desperate to buy anything cheap, only time will tell how it plays out for shareholders.

WHat I want to know is why the stock is so high after the disastrous 4th quarter results where the company lost money throughout 2017.

This is simple to answer. The company relies nearly 100% on fashion dolls for its profit (as it makes more than double the profit on fashion dolls than on any other category or brand). However, no one wants fashion dolls anymore - only character dolls. Barbie doesn’t have character - she’s been perfected so much that she’s boring.

MGo and RD continue to perpetuate a decades old habit: shift all marketing and investment away from all other brands to Barbie in order to artificially prop up the sales of Mattel’s singular icon. This is why the report claims Barbie (and Hot Wheels) show an increase in “retail” sales yet are still declining in wholesale dollars. Even by robbing other brands of their lifeblood Barbie and HotWheels STILL decline.

To get out of this MATTEL MUST call “time of death” on Barbie and reverse its “rob PETER to pay Paul” habit and let the Brand die so that FP, Thomas and the other brands can live.

Add to the mix the insane decision to have Ryder do all the routing for MAT and the dysfunction of the new huge DC in PA. They are both a disaster and caused a loss of millions.

Besides the mind numbing fact of loses totaling almost a billion dollars in one year, there is nothing stopping them from under performing and walking away with lottery winnings as a gold parachute. Despite many of the same executives in place , no group of shareholders, employees or any one else is in position to stop this train wreck. Yes Mattel has lost a lot of money. Company has not financially responded in a positive way to current leadership team. They are responsible and we can only hope stock market retribution is the mechanism to stop the situation.

This year Mattel faced multiple significant dislocations driven by retail inventory levels, planning misalignments, mixed brand performance and the TRU bankruptcy, duh, what's not to understand?

To put this in perspective, if one were to spend a dollar every second, it would 32 years to spend a billion dollars... I have no idea what's behind to losses, but they are staggering.