Good friend of mine who follows the BUSINESS side of the toy world sent me the following this evening. Analyze it as you will. I'm a little surprised Iron Man did THAT well given what I assume was a limited production run. How worried we should be about G.I.Joe or anything else our there that any of us collect, I'm honestly not sure...

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...I was reading Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. Seems that earnings are down across the board at the major toy companies, except for one--Hasbro reported an increase in second-quarter sales over last year. The reason? Iron Man toys exceeded expectations. Hasbro is rushing them back into production, and they should be flooding the shelves by the time the DVD is released.

Mattel was down 8% in the second quarter, but they have Batman for the third quarter. So far Iron Man is the best-selling toy line of the year, and is also the biggest earner.

The bad news is that Hasbro expects to raise prices for it's toys, you can read the two differant wires report on it, one alludes to earnings coming from toy movies, the other states it comes from core brands like joe and transformers

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080721/ap_ ... s_hasbro_6

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080721/bs_nm/hasbro_dc_2

Its better that the prices raise a little than the death of the product.
If the figures are $1 or $2 more, people will still buy them.

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I need to make an unfortunate correction. My friend e-mailed me again, and remarked that Mattel was down 48% -- not 8%. Ouch. I suspect they're hoping Batman pulls their fat out of the fire, but all of a sudden I'm worried about the rest of the DC line. And Masters.

(Edit - My friend pointed out that a lot of that 48% can be laid squarely in the lap of Speed Racer)

And I agree with Redmao. Batter a price hike than the extinction of the products.