Hasbro’s Wizards just worked their magic on earnings

Hasbro, the company behind iconic games like “Monopoly,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “Risk,” “Yahtzee,” and “Clue,” scored some serious points with investors this week, as revenue climbed 8% year over year to top $1.4 billion — a result powered less by plastic toys and more by pixels and cards.

Hasbro’s Consumer Products division, home to classics like “Monopoly,” Play-Doh, and Transformers, remained muted after a slow summer, with sales down 7%. That left the company’s Wizards of the Coast & Digital Gaming business — best known for “Magic: The Gathering” and “Dungeons & Dragons” — to pick up the pieces. And pick them up it did, with revenue in that division surging 42% from a year earlier.

Indeed, Wizards now accounts for over 40% of Hasbro’s total sales, up from ~30% a year ago, and boasts operating margins near 44%. That’s more than most luxury brands. (Ferrari’s, for example, was 28% last year, while Hermès managed a whisker over 40%.) The rest of Hasbro, the consumer bit, is closer to a 10% margin.

“Magic: The Gathering,” which is both a complicated strategy game and a compelling storytelling engine, is producing some particularly spellbinding results, with its revenue up an eye-watering 55% year over year. With a growing fanbase, revenues for “Magic” have been supercharged by collaborations with franchises like “The Lord of the Rings,” “Spider-Man,” and “Assassin’s Creed.”

To cushion against new tariffs, which have been lifted to as high as 100% on China-made goods, Hasbro said it plans to more quickly cut its reliance on China to 30% of its revenue by 2026. About half of Hasbro’s US toy and game volumes still come from China today.

Go Deeper: “Magic: The Gathering” is just the tip of a $1 billion digital iceberg