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I have been on an unplanned tour of turnaround CEOs in the last three weeks.
Learning a lot, but still.
Several weeks ago, I caught back up with Gap (GAP) CEO Richard Dickson, who, through sheer will and vision, is somehow mounting a revival of the apparel retailer. This is a company I once thought was dead, but maybe not anymore.
Not too long after that, there was coffee with new PayPal (PYPL) CEO Alex Chriss at the company's NYC headquarters.
Chriss is a little over a year into trying to revive PayPal, no easy task in a crowded payments field that includes American Express (AXP), Visa (V), MasterCard (MA), Affirm (AFRM), Klarna, and Block (SQ), among many others.
I came away impressed with Chriss's focus and fast-paced build-out of a new leadership team.
Sometime in 2025, you will see better financials from PayPal than those of the past three years because Chriss is broadening the platform's reach and figuring out how to better monetize Venmo. It won't be easy, but PayPal will see brighter days.
The next CEO on my turnaround tour was Hasbro's (HAS) Chris Cocks, a leader further along in his turnaround playbook than Dickson or Chriss. We chatted at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference this week, which you can watch in the above video.
It hasn't been an easy gig for the lifelong gamer-turned-CEO since assuming the position officially on Feb. 25, 2022.
First, this was Cocks's first CEO job, and with that came all the inevitable growing pains ranging from talking to investors to developing a trusted CEO network.
Second, he was taking the CEO baton from longtime leader Brian Goldner, a popular figure in the toy industry who died in October 2021 after a long battle with prostate cancer. It's never easy to follow a great.
And lastly, the company found itself in a battle with upstart activist shop Alta Fox, who demanded board changes and a spin-off of the Wizards of the Coast gaming business Cocks used to run. During this run, I was super critical of Hasbro and believed Alta Fox offered up a rational analysis for unlocking shareholder value.
Not helping matters were shifts in the toy industry such as a lower birth rate, post-pandemic inventory overhangs, and retailers ordering fewer goods to manage their inventory levels. The company's content business eOne, which Goldner bought in 2019 for $4 billion, was also massively underperforming.
Full-year 2023 sales plunged 15%. The company posted an adjusted operating loss of $477 million. And it lost all the toy headlines to Mattel's (MAT) Barbie movie domination.
Package all this up, and by fall 2023 Hasbro's stock was trading near 10-year lows!
Like I said, it hasn't been a fun road for Cocks.
But through a series of key actions in the past 12-months, his company could be beginning to come out the other side:
Inventory levels have been slashed by more than 50% as Hasbro focuses on the toys with the best sales and profit potential and digital game development. It may be losing market share amid the SKU (stock-keeping unit) clean-up, but at least it's not losing money on unsold leftovers.
The company completed the sale of eOne to Lionsgate for $375 million in cash in December 2023, removing an overhang from its financials.
Hasbro is well along the road to delivering $750 million in cost cuts in 2025 as part of a restructuring plan.
Cocks (who spent 14 years inside Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox division) has pivoted the business hard to games. Its Monopoly Go game, a joint venture with Scopely, has grossed $3 billion in sales life to date, with Hasbro taking in $45 million in sales in the first half of this year under its agreement.
"We have over 100 games in the pipeline on mobile through partnerships, and then we have several interesting joint ventures and partnerships that we're also talking about," Cocks told me at the conference. In light of the historically high multiples paid to acquire gaming businesses (see Take-Two (TTWO) buying Zynga for $12.7 billion in 2022), this pivot makes a lot of sense.
Cocks said Hasbro is now targeting "kidults," or those over the age of 13 who spend on gaming and more adult toys.
Hasbro's stock has shown signs of life this year as investors have gotten more familiar with the new business model and seen fewer negative surprises — shares are up 32% year to date.
Keeping the momentum going into year-end won't be easy, given conditions in the toy industry.
Sales of toys for the G12 countries fell 1% to $24.5 billion from January to June 2024, according to data from industry research firm Circana. The average selling price for toys was relatively unchanged at $11.57.
Only 4 of the 11 toy "super-categories" experienced sales growth from the G12 countries, underscoring the pressure the category is under as parents cut back.
But that ultimately begged the question: Should Hasbro even be considered a toy company anymore given the gaming push?
"I think we're a toy company in the most general sense that we're in the industry of play and we make physical things as well as digital things. But I'd like to think that we're helping to redefine what a toy company can be. To me, a toy company of the future is aged up. It's digital and it's heavily partner- based. And I think that's been key to our turnaround," Cocks said.
Three times each week, I field insight-filled conversations with the biggest names in business and markets on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid podcast. Find more episodes on our video hub. Watch on your preferred streaming service. Or listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
In the Opening Bid episode below, investor and retail expert Jeff Macke discusses how Target could get its mojo back.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn. Tips on deals, mergers, activist situations, or anything else? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
Read more coverage of the 2024 Goldman Sachs Communacopia and technology conference: