In the history of Hasbro, which is this amazing history, what are some of the things along the way that maybe you have taken something from where you're like, you know, I learned that this happened in the company's history where they made a pivot or survived or made an important decision and how it's maybe influencing how you think about the company? Well, hey, first off, thanks for having me.

We just started to put together for our 100th anniversary, a book, a kind of set of leadership principles, and we call it Play to Win.

And what we're trying to do in that book is encapsulate, you know, right now it's a list of about 12 things, but I think we're going to try to tighten it down to maybe 10 or so lasting leadership principles that have helped Hasbro stand the test of time and help us grow in good times and bad times.

um and turn things around when inevitably things have gotten tough um in our history and we're bringing on board uh current and uh past leaders from hasbro and it'll go from everything from You know, uh, our first principle, which is focused on play to, you know, driving community to thinking for the long term.

And we're gonna ground it in our different brands and kind of teach people about what makes Hasbro special by, uh, kind of the life lessons that our Saturday morning cartoons over the last 50 years about to teach people, whether it's friendship is magic or knowing is half the battle or the matrix of leadership.

And so, you know, I think when I kind of go back and I piece together like all the like all the lessons learned from that, I think three things really kind of pop into place.

I think the first thing is know what your center is.

Did those resonate in some way as you think about the company? For my

Can you just walk us through the thinking?

Well, I think most video game companies in a given year will have a variety of products in different stages of development and we're no different.

I think what we did is over the last six to nine months, we took a relook at our portfolio and said, okay, what can Hasbro be best in the world at? What can we uniquely do differently than anyone else? And we decided to refocus.

And, you know, the decision we made was trading card games and role-playing games were really vital to franchises like Magic the Gathering and D&D.

We're doubling down on those.

But other categories like strategy games, action, stealth.

You know, we work with over a thousand partners around the world with a very large licensing business.

What are you seeing with respect to consumer behavior or demand that's maybe not yet showing up in the data, but that you're planning for? Well,

Talk about what are some of the cross currents going on in the consumer products category.

Yeah, so sure, we had a cyber incident at the beginning of the quarter, which didn't help, but we executed our way through it.

We thought there would be $40 to $60 million of impact.

There was about 25 in the quarter, most of which we think is going to be recoverable in Q3 and Q4.

Hey, I would just say, generally speaking, the toy category is up through May.

From our partners at Circona, it's up over 3%.

It's been pretty broad-based.

Is it about now? Is it coming up? Are we past it? And how aggressive are you going to be loading up the shelves?

What do you expect from that in terms of toy sales, which are, you know, obviously the resin, the petroleum-based products are getting hit with cost pressures, but I would imagine you'll have some pricing power as well here.

Yeah, yeah, and we do.

We think $100 a barrel oil has about a $30 million cost headwind for us, but I think you have to look at that in the context of a business that generates $1.4 to $1.45 billion in EBITDA per year.

It's a relatively manageable set of cost pressures for us that we can offset inside of a large and diversified set of operations.

And I think you're right.

Our entertainment slate is second to none.

We've got The Mandalorian and Grogu opening this weekend, the first big new Star Wars movie.

Can you tell us about that?

Is that the thinking behind that?

Yeah.

So, we're building out our Montreal studios quite a bit.

So, we have a studio called Invoke that's based in Montreal, and then we're building out, for lack of a better word, like, a publishing and a shared services capability in that market.

And, you know, Montreal has, I think, arguably some of the best games talent in the world.

Um, they're specialists in action-adventure, kind of, kind of coming from, like, the Ubisoft school of game craft and design, and I think Ubisoft makes fantastic games.

And so there's a lot of talent there.

Yeah

How are you thinking about it?

Thinking about it a lot and in a lot of different [laughs] ways just to be, uh, at the 50,000-foot level.

You know, at the concepting phase, it, I suppose it depends on the context.

You know, from a creative context, you know, I think you have to think about it very carefully.

There are some brands that the audience, the creators just don't want it, so we don't even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering or D&D.

For things like toys, where we're basing it on kind of existing IP or, like, a long legacy of ideas, we are able to use it and use it pretty effectively.

And in that concept phase, especially when you're kind of, like, figuring out different ideas for toys and clever kind of derivatives of play patterns, it's pretty magical.

So just talk about how Hasbro is structured now, and how the IP licensing, like, flows through the structure you have now.

What did December look like specifically for that segment? Was there some weakness that we've seen elsewhere? Yeah.

Well, I think for us, what we saw was sequential improvement as we went through the holiday.

We had a great Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

There was a little bit of a dip in the first and second week in December, but then the end of the month ended with a real bang.

For Hasbro, our toy division grew share, I think 18 of the last 20 weeks of the year.

And I think that was on the strength of really good entertainment, really quality toys.

We had a great year for Beyblade, Transformers, Marvel, our Peppa Pig business returned to growth in the back half, and then our board game business did pretty well.

Does that help to offset business that's maybe hurt by tariffs, Chris? Because it strikes me that those businesses, the cards and the video games aren't as hurt by the taxes on imports?