[Steevy Maximus]

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Originally Posted by Catatronic

I still don't understand how Mattel is the biggest toy company when Hasbro has all the best stuff. Hasbro has it all, every Marvel character & movie, Transformers, GI Joe, Star Wars & now the Gobots. Doesn't Hasbro also own M.A.S.K., Micronauts & Visionaries (even though they're not actually doing anything with them?). How is it possible that Hasbro isn't the biggest & best toy company?

Hot Wheels and Barbie (and their secondary supplements like Matchbox and Monster High) are MASSIVE properties, each likely worth as much as a dozen GI Joes combined.

Mattel maintains their number one status by pure volume of sales and a significant international presence (which is why Hasbro has talked up its international expansion so much these past few years).
Remember, you walk into any retail venue that sells mass retail toys, or any place that sells toys at Christmas, you are GUARANTEED to find hundreds of Hot Wheels. From Dollar General to TRU, everybody sells Hot Wheels. That's a degree of saturation worth billions.

That said, the bulk of their sales ARE built on those two segments, so weakness in them will ripple severely (especially in the girl section, where Hasbro and MGA have taken big bites out of Mattel's supremacy).

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Originally Posted by VashTS

Is being a CEO harder than I think? Make products better, keep prices reasonable and pimp out movie stuff.

Making products better and keeping the price reasonable can often be contradictory goals, especially once you start talking about collector centric stuff (also, Mattel really didn't have a big movie from WB to support this year)

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They killed their biggest collector line, the line that gets people talking in DCUC because it sucked...it sucked!

The collector bases for Hot Wheels and Barbie utterly overshadow the collector base for DCUC.