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Mattel Inc.: A Financial Journal

A Financial Journal

Mattel, Inc.
Mattel, Inc. (Mattel) is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of toys and family products worldwide, including Barbie®, the most popular doll ever created. Mattel's portfolio of brands is comprised of best-selling brands such as Hot Wheels®, Matchbox®, American Girl® and Tyco® R/C, as well as Fisher-Price brands which include Little People®, Rescue Heroes®, Power Wheels® and a wide array of entertainment-inspired toy lines. Their other brands include American Girl®, Poly Pocket! ®, and Scrabble®, to name a few . Mattel's reportable segments are separately managed business units and are divided on a geographic basis between domestic and international. The Domestic segment is further divided into Mattel Brands US, Fisher-Price® Brands US and American Girl® Brands. Mattel also produces licensed toys for Sesame Street, Barney, and Nickelodeon. In additional, they also manufacture toys that are based on Walt Disney movies and Harry Potter books .

With worldwide headquarters in El Segundo, California, Mattel employs more than 25,000 people in 42 countries and sells products in more than 150 nations throughout the world. The Mattel vision is to be the world's premier toy brands—today and tomorrow.

The Toy Industry
The toy industry is big business, a $60B business to be exact. This excludes video games, which are in a different sector. The leading players are two big US toymakers: Mattel (Barbie®, Hot Wheels®, Fisher-Price®) and Hasbro (G.I. Joe®, Tonka®, Playskool®). Other big global players include Japan's Ban Dai Co. and Sanrio, as well as Denmark's Lego, whose annual sales are at around $1B.

Key to their sales is their retail network, and the biggest distributors in the US are large discount stores such as Wal-Mart (the biggest, with 20% of the US market), Kmart, and Target. Other distribution channels include specialty stores, but they have been pushed out by these big discount chains....