The Hasbro buyout rumour pops up every few years. They'd need to buy shares off a bunch of investment companies to take over a majority holding. As stated in a few articles being a publicly traded company any buyout would have to be notified to the shareholders and stock market.
Share prices being up look to be a side effect of monthly release cycles - instead of stock values waning in between codex releases like they used to the shorter release cycle appears to be keeping the price higher. They do appear to keep their investor relations page updated with info, the latest being just a few days ago:
http://investor.games-workshop.com/ Note that Nomad Investment Partnership has notified of an 11% shareholding in GW, however they used to hold more than this - in January, for instance, they had 18% share:
http://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-c ... tion-8.pdf , and if you check the GW page almost every notification over the past few months show the Nomad share shrinking. Looks like they're selling up, note 10 Jul 2013 here:
http://www.lse.co.uk/ShareTrades.asp?sh ... s_workshop where 50,000 shares were sold. There's been no notification on an increased share other than Legal and General in June:
http://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-c ... e-2013.pdf Note the primary shareholders here:
http://investor.games-workshop.com/shar ... tatistics/Shareholder Number of shares Percentage
The Nomad Investment Partnership LP 3,450,545 10.9%
Investec Asset Management Limited 3,087,765 9.7%
Ruffer LLP 2,492,260 7.8%
Tom Kirby 2,131,394 6.7%
Phoenix Asset Management Partners Limited 1,865,218 5.9%
FIL Limited 1,753,900 5.5%
Legal and General 1,683,901 5.3%
Artemis Investment Management LLP 1,620,001 5.1%
Compared to two years ago:
Shares Percentage
The Nomad Investment Partnership LP 7,414,887 23.8%
Investec Asset Management 5,768,410 18.5%
Phoenix Asset Management Partners Limited 4,190,607 13.5%
Shroeder Investment Management Limited 2,801,604 9.0%
Tom Kirby (Chairman of GW) 1,913,001 6.1%
Polar Capital Partners 1,162,220 3.7%
All of the top shareholders now have a lower number of shares each. Nomad has shed more than half it's shares in 2 years. If a takeover was imminent I'd expect shareholdings to remain stable, given that the shares are trading at higher values and a takeover would probably mean a spike in share prices making it better to hang onto the shares and dump them when the price jumps.
Did stumble across this that I hadn't seen before though -
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/join-t ... 2013-06-11
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