It’s not just revenge of the nerds, it’s a triumph of the nerds as news comes through that Games Workshop, creator of the world’s most popular miniature war game, Warhammer, has entered the hallowed ranks of the FTSE 100.
For anyone sadly uninitiated in this fantasy world, players have an army of miniature models that they move around a playing field and simulate battles where the outcome is determined by a combination of dice rolls and simple arithmetic.
The commercial masterstroke behind the company’s success was that Warhammer was the first commercial miniature war game to insist that its devotees use proprietary models manufactured by the company itself. So because every update to the rule book provides endless opportunities to unload the life savings on ever fancier models, the cash keeps rolling in.
The company now has more than 500 shops around the world. About 70% of sales come from outside the UK, and it has built on the hobby stock boom of the pandemic with pretax profits for the six months to December 1 expected to come in at about £120m.
The next step is to bring Warhammer out of the world of the anoraked hobbyist and into the mainstream. This is expected to be a tie-up with Amazon to create films and TV series based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe, with Warhammer fan and Superman star Henry Cavill linked to the project.
With its share price around a record high that gives the group a market capitalisation of more than £4.6bn, it’s come a long way from its origin of three friends selling handmade wooden games.
Ørsted: Wind taken out of sales
The re-election of Donald Trump was a dark day for Ørsted, and indeed for anyone who doesn’t agree with the president-elect’s view that climate change is a “hoax”.
He has promised to pull out of offshore wind projects on “day one”, to cancel President Joe Biden’s green subsidies, and to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement. None of this is exactly a shot in the arm for Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind company by operational capacity.
The company’s share price is down about 70% from its peak in 2021, as it has struggled to adapt to the end of an era of ultra-low-cost borrowing.
The cost of power generated by offshore wind has been falling fast, down to a global average of $81 per megawatt-hour from $137 in 2018, but it’s still higher than the $72 per megawatt-hour of a coal-fired power station.
Ørsted has transformed itself away from carbon into a world leader in renewables, announcing back in 2009 an ambitious plan to produce 85% of its power from renewables by 2040, up from 15% at the time, and by 2018 75% of its electricity was green.
However, rising interest rates and creaking global supply chains have seen the company stumble. In November 2023, when it announced that it was pulling out of two substantial projects in New Jersey, its share price started to crater.
Subsequently it has announced substantial job losses including its CFO and COO, a suspension of dividends, a downgrade in its renewables target and an exit from markets in Norway, Spain and Portugal. Intentions remain good in the sector, but execution is complex.
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