As if drowning in a massive mound of plastic waste wasn’t bad enough. The firm behind Funko Pop souvenirs, those little figurines that faintly resemble celebrities and fictitious characters, drastically overestimated demand and is now dumping $30 million worth of figurines in a landfill.
Funko’s stock price plummeted on Thursday after a catastrophic results call earlier this week, plunging by a shocking 25% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
The firm revealed that it was sitting on a vast pile of unsold goods, which had grown by 48% year on year.”This includes inventory that the company intends to eliminate in the first half of 2023 to reduce fulfillment costs by managing inventory levels to align with the operating capacity of our distribution center,” a press release reads. “This is expected to result in a write down in the first half of 2023 of approximately $30 to $36 million.”
In other words, considering each Funko Pop figurine averages around $8 to $11, they’re dumping millions of figurines into the garbage.
Last year, the firm was already in financial trouble, with its distribution center in Arizona so overloaded with merchandise that it had to rent shipping containers to keep it all.
The venture’s shares had already plummeted by November when it cut its financial projections for the remainder of the year.
The figurines are made of polyvinyl chloride, also known as PVC, a petroleum-derived chemical derived from vinyl chloride — a substance that may sound familiar because it was all over the news last month after a disastrous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which released copious amounts of the stuff into the surrounding environment and waterways.
Reference- Kotaku reports, Investor, Business Insider, Forbes