I always figured Marklin's gross sales would have been higher than 107M euros. I guess they are not as big as I thought. I wonder what the sales were back in the good old days before the family ownership went bust? I imagine those figures were never made public.



They do a lot to themselves that also damages the brand.

Without investigation and only from my memory: I think they were around 120M under Kingsbridge and around 160M before Kingsbridge and before they bought LGB.

On one hand, it's a shrinking market.

On the other hand, there are a few housemade problems: while Piko introduced the first G gauge models, LGB was busy transferring production from Germany to Hungary and could not deliver.
Z gauge also had times when they didn't deliver much and nothing on time (relocating production from Germany via China to Hungary).

New Märklin (after insolvency) is in a good starting position to present growing turn-over figures year by year, re-starting at a low level.

Sometimes they show figures for the Märklin holding (incl. Trix and LGB), sometimes they show figures for Märklin only.

The way i see the future Marklin is also very unlikely to have a wonderfull 2014 sales year.

Here's a link to the complete interview with Mr Sieber (German only - I didn't check the readability of the Google translation ...):
http://www.stuttgarter-n...4-8faf-a397ff9f2fc4.html

A few years ago you could wait for Roco models to be dumped with 50% discount - no need to pre-order them.
Nowadays it can happen that you pre-order a Roco model - and later the model is cancelled because of not enough pre-orders.

I don't know if Märklin will also be as consequent as Roco.
In the interview Mr Sieber talks about trade fair discounts: pre-orders placed shortly after presentation of the toy fair new items allow them to estimate the size of their production runs.
If they disappoint the bargain hunters in 2014, the trade fair pre-orders in 2015 will be meaningful and helpful to determine the 2015 production runs. If they are consequent.

What Maerklin, Roco and the other companies have to learn is that in face of lesser quality and inferior design, people are less willing to commit to pre-orders sight unseen based only on images contained in 'New Items' Brochures and photos of 'Demo' models exposed at Nuremberg or other Shows.
Based on the recent track record of these companies, people are hesitant to commit to buy, because they want to know how the final model will appear and whether the company will correct any issues that may be present on the 'Demo' or vis-a-vis earlier models of similar models.
This makes it harder for dealers and distributors to commit to specific quantities, which down the line, makes it harder for the company to determine what size production run is required.
One thing that might help, since these forums are places where their customers congregate, would be for the companies to invite forum members to view models in the earliest stages of production, and suggested corrections/improvements could be implemented in a manner which would hopefully reassure both the company and the customer that the product will meet the expectations of the modeller.
The problem is that if company X invests 1,000,000 in new models in year A and expects to bring in 1,750,000, of which 1,000,000 will be invested in the next year's new models, but the company only yielded a minimal profit or a slight loss, the tendency has been to clear out a number of those models to recover some of the money. The problem here is that dealers who paid full pop for the same item may not be happy at having to sell it for a loss or having to list it at full price when the shop down the street offers it for half price.
I would think that they may want to consider some sort of promotion where you buy a new model of the next year, it would make you eligible to buy one of the older models at say, half price. This way, they would get the sale of the new item, as well as helping to clear out surplus inventory of older models.
Discontinued models should still be liquidated, but with a reasonable discount. Dealers who want to gamble on those items can order one or more in the hope that after the factory is sold out, they might then be able to sell those models at higher prices if they ride out the liquidation phase.

But the bottom line is that the companies have to improve the quality to restore the number of committed advance orders, thereby reducing the need to liquidate the inventory at the end of each quarter or year.

Just my two cents

Regards

Mike C

Two bankruptcies (1-the family selling when liabilities exceeded assets and 2-an actual declared bankruptcy) does not suggest to me they know what they are doing, just that someone new is willing to risk their fortunes with Marklin. I wish Herr Sieber well, but the core administration (vice presidents and down) is most likely the very people who busted the company twice before. I am sure he is depending on them and their "knowledge" of the model railroad industry for advice and direction. He is humble enough to recognize model railroading is not a part of the toy market Simba Dickie have prior history. I think he would be better served by dumping the very people who broke the company and finding new blood both inside and outside the model railroad industry for advice.

I'm not sure your historical description is correct. As far as I understood it your #1 was not a bankruptcy just disagreement in the family on how to proceed and those who wnated to sell won. #2 was if I have under stood the legal situation not a full bankruptcy and as far as understand it was the German equivalent of the US "filing for chapter 11 protection". The reason for this second step was that Kingsbridge had used expensive consultants and ran the company dry of funds. The people that did this were dumped under the "Pluta" administration of the company and in my mind the remaining higher management do have the knowledge to develop models. In particular since the "Pluta" administration made them realize the importance of the cost of components and guarantee repairs when dumping the C-sine motors and instead standardize on fewer and cheaper motors. You could be right that Mr Sieber may have to look for some new blood in the areas of new "business opportunity tracing/identification".

Under the Pluta administration there was positive cash flow, so hopefully the new owners paid a price according to that. Then there will be enough for investment purposes to obtain new models and product lines.

Regarding the My Marklin product line, this is a very long term investment because studies have shown that most kids leave the hobby later to rejoin it after remembering the childhood years.

Right now, Marklin has to maximize saless to us older people who collect and build layouts that maybe we couldn't afford or have time for while our kids were with us. In the market this demands a high quality product IMHO.

Wikipedia refers to an article by DER SPIEGEL, but in that article I cannot find the figures quoted in Wikipedia.

The purchase price was never announced. A newspaper gave the figure of €30,000,000, but there is no confirmation.

It's right the company was owned by three families. Actually 22 persons owned the company - and they could only decide unanimously and one can imagine that this leads to a lack of decisions.
The decision to sell to Kingsbridge also took very long as three owners didn't want to sell.

The previous owners received money, so it's unlikely the debts were bigger than the value of the company. But debts were growing fast.

Agreed, debt did not exceed assets, the families did receive money. But when debt is $70 million and you sell for $38 million, your debt to asset ratio is poor and a very good reason for banks to worry and charge a high interest rate. If the numbers are correct, Marklin's net worth was about $108 million in 2006. If "debts were growing fast", it is only a matter of time. If a unanimous decision of 22 people was needed to reach a decision and the intangible factor of it being personal since it was a family owned business was surely a consideration, then clearly the family owned Marklin was not long for this world and they (some grudgingly) accepted that fact.

... some figures & analysis given by Wikipédia are just about anything !!!....

Hi!
I didn't find this set in my 2008 Koll, but I guess this set was made by Märklin on behalf of another company (Märklin make many special models for huge dealers or dealer groups).
At least it's not in Märklin's product database. If it was, people in France and Germany or even Sweden could also buy it.

They say it's a long-term investment.
They reduced the expectations for 2013 sales and stopped "emergency sales" to protect the brand from further damage. That looks like a move in the right direction IMHO.

Hi Tom,
I believe this car is only available from this month.

regards
Kimball