Whether it’s relaxing to rummage through hundreds of jigsaw pieces in search of exactly that one piece that fits, people may have different feelings about it. What they at least notice with the toy manufacturer Ravensburger: The second year of the pandemic also prompted many people to devote themselves to completely analogue hobbies – such as jigsaw puzzles. The company sold 32.4 million units in 2021, four million more than in the previous year. The most popular motif was not a dreamy sunny beach or an impressive skyline. “It’s a 1,000-piece puzzle that you can customize with your own photo,” says CFO Hanspeter Mürle.
And there is another surprising comeback: “Painting by numbers” is back in fashion, precisely because many people in the pandemic “want to live out their creativity,” explains CEO Clemens Maier, great-grandson of the company’s founder Otto Maier. 2.6 million pieces were sold worldwide last year, and the painting instructions were a big hit, especially in Italy.
And yet: Ravensburger is a long way from the sales increases from the first pandemic year 2020. At that time, the Swabian family company had reported a record increase of more than twenty percent. The reasons were obvious: Most people sat at home in lockdown for months, both children and adults wanted to keep themselves busy. And they didn’t just do that much more often by playing games on the computer and watching series on Netflix – many also discovered board games, puzzles or construction kits for themselves. That continues to apply, says Clemens Maier, it is not due to a lack of demand that Ravensburger’s sales grew by only one percent to 636 million in 2021, others are doing better. According to the German Association of the Toy Industry, sales in the industry increased by four percent to almost four billion euros in 2021.
USA tarnish the balance sheet
According to CFO Mürle, Ravensburger reached the limits of its production capacity last year. Despite three-shift operation, weekend work and overtime, the high demand could not be adequately met in all markets. In the US, the second-biggest market, revenue fell 19 percent while all other markets grew significantly. Those responsible explain this with delivery problems, which were aggravated by the fact that logistics in the USA are particularly complex. Ravensburger had taken over the companies Wonder Forge and Thinkfun there in recent years, each with their own logistics centers. When they were merged, there was a problem, also because the tight job market last year had great problems finding drivers to transport the goods across the country. “We have largely had these problems under control since mid-December,” said CFO Mürle. In addition, containers from Europe often arrived with a long delay, where Ravensburger manufactures its toys at the company headquarters in Upper Swabia and in Polička in the Czech Republic.
In order to be able to produce more, the company is investing more than 100 million euros from the beginning of 2020 until the end of the current year. The number of employees also grew by 109 to 2,413 last year. And yet, according to Mürle, it takes longer than usual to get new machines for production, and seasonal workers are also rare.
But something will also change for customers in the next few months: Ravensburger will raise prices by around five percent on average. “This applies to all products,” announced the CFO. The reason for this is increased costs for transport and energy, but also for materials such as paper, cardboard and plastic granulate.