Hasbro 2011 Annual Report Download - page 3

and last year, these users battled more than 26
million times.
Through our partnership with Nelvana,
d-rights and TakaraTomy, we set out to manage
BEYBLADE as a long-term battling brand with
continuous innovation. Leveraging global television
programming and innovative play patterns, we
are excited to be entering the next phase of our
strategy with new, innovative play patterns.
The NERF brand, which has grown fourfold
over the past fi ve years, delivered $410 million in
revenue in 2011, essentially fl at with 2010, driven
by strong growth from international markets. The
NERF team continues to deliver great innovation
for the brand and we have several major new
initiatives planned for 2012.
2011 also marked the fi rst year under our long-
term partnership with Sesame Workshop. Together,
we are building a year-round global brand and we
are creating play experiences around a number
of SESAME STREET characters, including ELMO,
COOKIE MONSTER, and others, which engage
children and help them learn.
U.S. & Canada Execution
While our recent investments in establishing
our global presence enabled us to deliver very
strong growth in our international business and
overall solid revenue growth for Hasbro during
the fourth quarter and full year 2011, we did not
meet our expectations for growth in the U.S. and
Canada segment, including in the Games and
Puzzles category. When we look to our success
internationally, we know - and you can see - that
our innovation, marketing and brands are very
successful. While our performance in the U.S. and
Canada segment was in line with the industry’s
overall decline of 2%, we believe we can do better.
We have appointed new leadership in the
U.S. and Canada business, naming Wiebe Tinga
President. Wiebe is a proven Hasbro executive
with 24 years of experience leading global
sales and marketing teams. He and his team are
implementing an approach that is similar to how
we go to market internationally. By focusing
marketing spend more on the consumer, by pricing
our product to refl ect our innovation and by
strengthening our partnerships with our retailers,
we believe we can deliver better performance in
the U.S. & Canada business.
Hasbro Gaming
Our Games and Puzzles category performance
was also disappointing last year, contributing to
the weakness in the U.S. During the year, under
new leadership, we outlined a multi-year plan to
drive innovation and excellence in gaming, with
the goal of stabilizing this business in 2012 and
delivering growth in 2013 and beyond. We are now
focusing on a core set of gaming brands. We have
demonstrated in recent years that when we drive
innovation in our gaming brands, we have delivered
growth. But similar to the change we made in our
toy business a few years back, we must focus our
development and marketing resources on select
gaming brands that we view as having the greatest
global potential.
An example of the successful execution of this
approach is MAGIC: THE GATHERING. The team at
Wizards of the Coast has done a tremendous job
of taking this brand, which totaled less than $100
million in revenues in 2008 and was declining, to
where it is today - the largest brand in our Games
and Puzzles category, the largest game brand in
the U.S. and more than double its size versus just
three years ago. It demonstrates that with new
leadership, strong consumer insights, innovative
game play, and the integration of face-to-face and
digital play, gaming brands can thrive.
We also are working to better leverage the
nearly one billion gamers in the marketplace today
- that is fi ve times the number of gamers from just
a few years ago. However, we recognize that we
can’t grow our gaming business in the future the
same way we had grown it historically. To better
leverage today’s technology and digital play, we are
working with great partners, including Electronic
Arts and Activision, to develop Hasbro brands into
digital games. We are also teaming with Jagex
and NetDragon to bring TRANSFORMERS MMO
annual report 2011