Of the pieces we are interested in, there seem to only be two:
With respect to mix, we saw some very good growth in the quarter in our core brands and in particular those brands are profitable and contributed a great deal in volume and much of that passed through. The other thing that’s not really in the cost category but we benefited from in the quarter and we’ve told people is that our amortization expense is continuing to decline as our Wizards of the Coast amortizations is starting to roll off in the quarter.
As we look at Hasbro’s mega brand performance; Littlest Pet Shop, Monopoly, Magic the Gathering, Nerf, and Playskool all grew in the quarter. In addition, Baby Alive, Play-doh, Tonka, FurReal Friends, and Super Soaker were all up versus a year ago. The Iron Man brand also contributed to the growth in our global boys business in the quarter. We are excited for the opening of Iron Man 2 scheduled for May 7th.
So... they had some kind of one-time costs with respect to Wizards of the Coast that they were doing as monthly payments. Those are running out, which means that the costs of owning WotC are dropping. Also, they report that Magic is making them a lot of money, and counts as a "mega brand" up there with Transformers and Nerf.One more thing I should mention as I look at the array of games that are selling well I think the Wizards of the Coast folks certainly deserve a shout out for their effort and really Magic the Gathering is performing exceedingly well both as the analog paper based game as well as online.
Equally interesting is that Dungeons and Dragons still does not rate a mention in the discussion. And that the current waves of firings began right after this call. So we can dispense with any conspiracy theories that the cost reductions mentioned had anything to do with Andy Collins leaving. But we can infer that D&D is not doing as well as hoped, because it was just after they opened up the books for Q1 that they felt th need to give Magic the Gathering a couple of shoutouts for being awesome and start firing half the creative staff working on the current edition of D&D.
-Username17