Over $30 million worth of Funko Pop figures! they will go to the landfill

Funko revealed these plans in a recent earnings call filled with so much bad news that the company’s share price plummeted the next day.

“Year-end inventories totaled $246.4 million, up 48% over last year,” the company wrote in a Wednesday press release (via ICv2). “This includes inventory that the Company intends to eliminate in the first half of 2023 in order to reduce order fulfillment costs by managing inventory levels to align with the operational capacity of our distribution center. This is expected to result in a write-off in the first half of 2023 of approximately $30 million to $36 million.”

Corporate-to-human translation: Funko magazines are overflowing with five-inch, super-deformed Machine Gun Kelly, Spider-Man, Pikachu, and every other more or less famous pop culture personality, and throwing them away will be cheaper than trying to sell them. Speaking to investors, CEO Brian Mariotti said the new Arizona distribution center is so full that the company is losing cash by renting shipping containers to keep excess inventory.

Mariotti came to the company last year after earnings reports were deteriorating. The share price fell in November when Funko cut its financial projections for this year, and fell another 25 percent this week when the company revealed it would also lay off 10 percent of its employees.

Problems appear to have piled up with supply chain shortages coupled with extra income and home time during the early years of the pandemic, spurring demand for Funko Pop sales! When demand has subsided, the company has plenty of inventory at a time when sales are down. It is also hard not to wonder if the fashion for figurines with overgrown heads is over.

. How many more Grog do humans need? Funko Pop! they have long been supported by a speculative secondary market trying to stay ahead of the curve on which release will end up rare and valuable in the future. A pair of Willy Wonka Pops recently went for a hundred thousand dollars.

In the long run, 99 percent of the figures are worthless, except for the fact that fans get a momentary joy from making eye contact with the ones on their shelves from time to time. And now it seems like tons more are headed to a landfill somewhere in Arizona. May future archaeologists or aliens studying the remains of our civilization forgive us…

Source:
Own study/Kotaku