[xhkkffbf]

It don't mean to diminish Warhammer's success, but part of the reason why it's one of the "biggest companies" is because many of the other big companies have slowly disappeared. Britain used to have a viable ship building industry that employed huge amounts of people. It's gone. It can't compete. And the same story is repeated again and again. Companies like Morris Garage and Triumph used to compete on the world stage. No longer.

Again, I'm proud of the Warhammer folks. It's just the fact that it's one of the "biggest" makes me sad.

[pjc50]

"We don't make anything" and "there are no large British companies" are memes that help people feel better about perceived decline. It's not really representative.

https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100/constit... ; you can easily sort by market cap. GW are on page 4. Perhaps remarkably close to the two supermarket chains, Sainsburys and M&S, but those are much lower margin.

The top has "proper" global manufacturing companies: Astrazeneca, Unilever, Glaxo-SmithKline, BAE, Rolls-Royce. Along with the resource extraction companies, and Britain's major services export industry: banking.

(oddity: there are two Coca-cola companies on the FTSE, CCEP and CCH, which presumably exists for some weird tax reason)

Then you get into the question: what counts as a "British company"? There are plenty of overseas-owned UK success stories that are still significant UK employers and bringing money into the UK, such as ARM. Conversely, does a company which is listed on the FTSE but has most of its operations all over the world like RTZ count as "British"? Successful British startups quite often exit and vanish from discourse, while continuing to operate.

To my mind the important questions are "does this bring in valuable forex?" and "does this result in substantial UK employment?" Those don't necessarily have to be in the same company. The big employer list looks different: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1218430/largest-uk-based...

HSBC still up there (over 200k UK staff!), but there's a lot of food service (Compass), retail (Kingfisher you will know as B&Q) and so on.

I've not even got into the videogame industry (very good export industry, and seemingly responsible for the success of Warhammer). If you insist on making physical objects your perspective is going to be unnecessarily narrow.

[clarionbell]

Yes. One advantage GW has, is that it has never outsourced manufacturing. The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor.

[petesergeant]

> The miniatures are still made locally, so they haven't lost their expertise, nor are they threatened by a former contractor turned competitor

Deeply skeptical that that's actually much of a factor in their success.

[dboreham]

Somehow all this was done seemingly deliberately, as some MBA new hire project at a BigCo. Like how Google kills off half their useful services because nobody in the C suite knows what they're for.

Also, they (the Callahan government) had a plan to bring state of the art semiconductor manufacturing to the UK. Basically TSMC but in Wales. Thatcher killed it.

[alexisread]

It was a massive shame the TV-toy project at Sinclair did not work out. It was a SOC/low cost computer based on the Inmos transputer (Called the T400, an M212 without dedicated link hardware) around 1983. That might have kept Inmos afloat- they were responsible for a lot of the RAM chip innovation, VGA standard, transputer etc. so the world would have looked very different. I do wonder what could have been with that chip paired with the Slipstream chip, oh well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer TV-toy

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/inmos-and-the-transputer TV-toy

https://www.transputer.net/tn/50/tn50.html M212 details

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/271372-flare-technology-an... 9.2mb/s bandwidth+sequencer_list