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Spitfire business things

  • Thread starter Thread starter thereus
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In summary.... they have enough money to resolve the bugs quickly. For the rest it's a good thing for them that the company is successful.
 
sundrowned said:
Does the profit margin matter that much to a company like Spitfire? As long as everyone involved is getting paid, they're making good sales, and aren't making repeated losses. Isn't that the main point of a company like that? It's a small to medium sized creative business.
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Poor margin are a route to failure whatever the business. Margins are life blood - then you can decide what to do with the margins - that's the luxury of success.
 
Quantum Leap said:
Prices are too low and everyone expects the world for $300.
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Nick, isn't EW partly to blame for that? If I am not mistaken they were one of the first companies to offer deep discounts. For 300$ you get EW Hollywood Orchestra these days. It's very difficult for other developers to compete against that amount of highest quality samples for that little money.
 
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muk said:
One thing that has improved since Mr. Henson left is the marketing, in my opinion. It seems the recklessly overhyped and drawn out marketing campaigns with trailers for anouncement's announcement were his input. Since he left, the constant shouting in our faces of their marketing has ceases. It's very much toned down to a sensible level now. Instead, Crow Hill are doing it now - if on a much smaller scale. For all the good Mr. Henson did at Spitfire, I am glad that the overblown marketing is gone.
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Henson either gets in your head or he annoys. For many he probably does some of both. If you look at libraries as simply tools for your work, he can be most annoying indeed. But if you see the libraries as embodying particular aesthetic preferences, as works of and for potential art, things appear in a different light. Such preferences are rarely usefully highlighted in library marketing, and his "hype" is not ultimately hype at all but a way of forging a path to a specific musicality built around those preferences and embodied in the libraries. There's undoubtedly a lot that can go wrong with that, especially if those aesthetic preferences depart markedly from your own. (But then again in those cases because the aesthetic—how to come at the material, how to shape it, what sorts of material you'll have to work with—is foregrounded, it's usually pretty obvious if it's a fit for your own.)

Henson also made many mistakes along the way. Sometimes it can feel more like he's selling a creative's life style than tools of the craft. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that per se, except when the life style trumps functionality. I rarely find that to be the case with the libraries he's involved with, even those that don't especially appeal to my own aesthetic sensibilities. But most of the libraries he was heavily involved developing bear his imprint. (Few, though, were really "game changers," and I don't miss the steady cadence of that claim with each SF release.)
 
Alex Fraser said:
Couple that with a YouTube/Tech House style policy of ploughing everything back into growth perhaps?
Make sure everyone is paid whilst amassing 1000's of hours of recordings and develop new software that the business can mine on repeat for years to come.

I mean..what comes after Abbey Road Orchestra has been shipped?
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Abbey road choir, abbey road chamber, abbey road evos… it’s definitely a consideration but OT with Teldex, Spitfire with AIR, and VSL with Synchron have spent close to a decade filling up full product lines with their studios. Abbey Road also has a dual reputation in orchestral and pop, so there’s more unique material for them to mine. It’s an open question though how much marketable value that can bring when we already have full product lines for Teldex, AIR, Synchron… that’s a big question for Spitfire moving forward to address with their products.
 
lutheal said:
What's really telling here is the profit margin.

In 2021, it was about what it should be for a software company, just around 20%.
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But 4 out of 5 of these years, the profit margin is dismal. 2019 and 2020 both had a 1% profit margin (that's really low), 2022 had 7% profit (not terrible but not great) and then the loss this year. They certainly can get a lot of sales, but it seems their costs are out of control.
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For companies like these, where products have long shelf lives, year to year profit margins aren't as useful of a guideline as they are for normal companies. Dollars (okay, pounds) spent now are more of an investment than an operational expense, since anything they create now will keep paying off for years to come. It's money in the bank, even though it doesn't show up on the balance sheet.

In other words, they could decide today they're happy with what they have and call it quits on development. Yearly expenses would plummet as they fire everybody except a marketing guy and a few people to handle tech support. Profits would instantly shoot up to over 50% as they'd still sell millions per year for the next decade or so, at almost no cost, essentially "coasting" for as long as people keep buying this stuff.
 
Spitfire Audio already offer curated samples in their products. Didn’t expect it would end up with curated revenues.
 
After Mural and Sable and SSO, I’m sure there were folks that asked “what’s more left to do? They’ve sampled all the sections at Air.” And yet, here we are 10+ years later and Spitfire is still making new libraries and greatly exceeding their annual revenue run rate from 10 years ago.
 
rembrant said:
1) could be the ex-CEO Will Evans.

"Revenue for the year... was lower than the prior... a continuation of the expected decrease in e-commerce following the peak activity during covid pandemic". They anticipated a decline in turnover and probably have a longer term strategy thats in action currently, meaning a bigger hit this year for future benefit. I don't think the company has been merely fumbling along with it's eyes closed.
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Possibly, but he resigned after CH in May. I would think any “hit” from Wil leaving would be in the 2024 accounts.
 
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