More than half of board game giant Asmodee’s net sales come from just five product lines – and two of those are Magic and Pokemon

Tabletop game publishing and distribution giant Asmodee has acknowledged that its business model exhibits a “concentration risk”, with more than half of its €1.2bn in annual net sales coming from just five product lines.

Asmodee currently has a portfolio of about 4,000 game products across 400 IPs, and says it releases more than 1,000 new ‘stock keeping units’ (SKUs) each year. It sold more than 110 million games and card sets in the financial year ending March 31, 2024.

But the company, which began trading on the Nasdaq Stockholm exchange last week to seal its split from former owner Embracer Group, said in a shareholder prospectus that its “ability to successfully manage and eventually decrease product range dependency may be important for ensuring sustainable growth and stability”.

Two of Asmodee’s top five product ranges are trading card game titans Magic: The Gathering and the Pokemon TCG, which it distributes to retailers on behalf of Hasbro and The Pokemon Company respectively.

The remaining three top lines are from Asmodee’s own studios, through its games and products based on Ticket to Ride, Exploding Kittens and Dobble/Spot-it!

The company has released two base games and nine map expansions for Ticket to Ride, a children’s version of the game, a legacy version, two deluxe editions and six variants based on individual cities. The series has sold 19 million products since 2004.

But Asmodee said in the ‘Risk Factors’ segment of its prospectus that it “might need to diversify its product offering and actively grow its sales of other games (particularly through its pillar brands), while also pursuing external growth through strategic acquisitions of new IPs”.

Asmodee has already revealed that it plans to “reignite” its strategy of buying up smaller board game publishers and distributors in the wake of its split from Embracer Group, with eyes on a pipeline of more than 20 acquisitions – mirroring the heavy expansion the business undertook after being bought by private equity firm Eurazeo in 2014.

Asmodee’s previous buying spree saw it acquire more than 40 publishers, distributors, IPs and other companies over the last decade, including over 20 game studios such as Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, Lookout Games, Catan Studio and Z-Man Games.

Those new acquisitions will take time, however, according to Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler. In a Q&A following the presentation of Asmodee’s Q3 report yesterday, Koegler said, “I know there is a lot of interest around us resuming our M&A agenda, we are also obviously very excited about this perspective.

“However, I would just like to remind everybody that it’s an engine, so it takes a bit of time to reignite all of this and to go through acquisition processes.”

He added, “At this stage we already have a quite strong global geographical presence, so priority will most likely be around publishing studios, also creative capabilities and intellectual properties. However, obviously on a case-by-case basis we will also consider acquiring distributors, either to enter new territories or strengthen our local presence.”

Asmodee’s emergence as a separate listed company has been accompanied by a much more granular release of its financial information than under its three-year-ownership by Embracer.

Details unveiled in the shareholder prospectus show that despite Asmodee’s huge push internationally in the past decade, France remains the company’s biggest market in terms of net sales at 19% – representing about €242m in the 2023/24 financial year.

That figure was up 13% year on year, with Asmodee citing sales of Magic and The Pokemon TCG as key to the increase.

The US market was second on 17%, just ahead of Germany (16%) and the UK (15%). The rest of Europe accounted for 24%, with the four Scandinavian countries together making up about 6% of net sales.

Speaking during the Q3 results Q&A, Koegler said of Asmodee’s expansion in the US in recent years, “Effectively our US business has historically been built more on games published by the group. However, in the past five or six years we have also slowly been building the capabilities in order to be able to have a model, I would say, that is leveraging everything we’re able to leverage in the more mature markets in certain European countries.

“And that does include significant investments for us to go what we call ‘direct to hobby’ – building sales and logistics capabilities over the past years. This is very important, because it opens up for the team the ability to strengthen the catalogue with games published by partners, which the team has been starting to do quite actively in the past two years. But we are still in early days.

“And secondly, in the US we were absolutely not operating on the trading card game market, which has now changed in this year with the launch of Star Wars: Unlimited and Altered. So I would say we are moving towards a model that is more close to what we have in Europe.”

Asmodee hailed the success of Star Wars: Unlimited as the headline reason for its 6% net sales growth in FY23/24, as demand “notably outpaced supply” on release of the TCG’s first set last March.

Publisher Fantasy Flight Games revealed on Twitter just a week after the game went on sale that it had “already far exceeded the sales of any game we have ever released”.

Fantasy Flight released two more card sets for Star Wars: Unlimited in June and November last year, and plans to bring out three more sets in 2025.

Altered, meanwhile, broke records last February when it raised more than €6.2m from almost 15,000 backers in its Kickstarter campaign, becoming the most funded TCG project on the platform.

Koegler was also asked about the potential effect of tariffs during the Q3 Q&A, which he said currently remains “relatively limited” for the company.

He said, “We are manufacturing in a quite balanced way in Europe, in the US and in China. Tariffs have been announced but are still not completely clear in the sense that the exact product categories impacted have not been yet published, to my knowledge, by the US government.

“So, in the case we are impacted on the main flows, which are US-China, and to a lesser extent … the retaliation tariffs from Canada to the US, we have options to move production around with production partners all around the globe. We have also ability to move certain elements in our supply chain to limit the impact.

“And then I would say that, in the end, that we will also see with our manufacturing partners and with our retail partners on how we can mitigate all of this to limit the impact, but exposure remains relatively limited for Asmodee.”