The Financials of Finecast

A great discussion about the benefits of Finecast, and how it plays out to our overall costs of models. I know there has been a lot of complaining about the cost of finecast models, however, as this rumor points out, if the models had remained metal, the costs increase would be far greater.

Please remember that these are rumors.

via Headless Horseman on Faeit 212
I talked to                          today about Finecast and issues with it. It appears that Finecast was thought-up to be a counter to rising tin prices (more than 4x in the past decade, apparently), which affected the cost of the metal models. If they hadn't switched over, the cost of metal models right now would be far more expensive. 


Their long-term plan is to move everything to resin, however - my personal opinion, it sounds like a stop-gap measure from how he talked about it. Looks like we really need to start thinking of GW's actions as long-term oriented vs. short-term (i.e. complaining about price hikes and quality drops in Finecast). Smart cookies. 


There was also a breakdown of communications within departments of the plan for Finecast, but that's being remedied now. While their product defect rate is far higher with Finecast compared to metal, GW's plan is to simply use numbers to counterbalance that, which explains why they have a very open policy when it comes to Finecast exchanges - they had anticipated it from the start. This message just wasn't clearly passed on from their manufacturing to marketing. GW also runs at a 90% production cost margin.