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Holiday Shopping Season: The hottest toy this season

Posted November 23, 2007

“Mattel is still going to have a happy holiday season, despite new challengers in the doll market, but everybody else is there already, picking up the toymaker while it’s down around its 52-week low.” — Stephanie Grimmett

by Stephanie Grimmett, TFN

Baltimore — (TFN): Christmas is 32 days away. Maybe I should rephrase that. Christmas is ONLY 32 days away!

Parents can feel the panic start to rise sometime around November 5. The eyes grow shifty and the palms start to sweat in anticipation of fighting the crowds, or worse, missing the crowds and not being able to find that one toy little Suzie, Johnny, Baahir or Rosita has been asking for forever. That is, after toy companies rolled out their Christmas catalogs in June.

If you don’t have to worry about buying the perfect toy, you might see the holiday season a little differently.

Right now, I’m here to represent the nine-year-old girl contingent. It’s going to be a Hannah Montana Christmas, a Hannah Hanukkah and quite possibly a Hannah Kwanzaa, too. (Any holiday’s I left out? Forgive me, I’ve been out of academia for a while…)

Fourteen-year-old Miley Cyrus performed in stadiums packed with screaming preteens and their befuddled parents across the country this year in her Hannah Montana world tour. And tickets for the shows went for as much as $1,000 a pop.

I don’t know about you, but my parents wouldn’t have paid $50, let alone $1,000, for me to go to a concert as a kid, not even for the Elvis Resurrection tour. And you have to wonder who would pay that much for them now, unless there was a custody battle in the offing.

But Hannah-hysteria has reached such a frenzy that analysts are even predicting the pint-sized pop star’s half-pint-sized doll is going to challenge Barbie this holiday season.

Barbie producer Mattel Inc (MAT: NYSE) is still trying to recover from its killer toys catastrophe earlier this year, when the toy producer had to recall 21 million of its products after it discovered they contained dangerous magnets and lead paint.

Barbie’s sales have been sliding for the last nine months, with or without the recall, and Hannah is challenging her with a series of tie-ins that Barbie has yet to beat. For one thing, you can buy a singing Hannah doll.

Barbie doesn’t sing, except in those DVDs that I, being from the pre-walking and talking, computer-animated Barbie era, find unnerving. But the Hannah doll will perform her hit singles for you as she stands on her (cardboard) fold out stage.

Mattel is still going to have a happy holiday season, despite new challengers in the doll market, but everybody else is there already, picking up the toymaker while it’s down around its 52-week low.

And Hannah is owned, lock stock and barrel, by Disney, which will fly through the holidays, pennants raised and stock price blazing, with or without the teen sensation (I give you Meet the Robinsons, High School Musical and Ratatouille as my justification for that statement).

But Hannah’s merchandise, along with some of that for the Disney Princesses line and High School Musical, is produced not by adorable talking woodland animals in the Magic Kingdom but by JAKKS Pacific (JAKK: NASDAQ), the toy company most famous for Pokemon tie-ins.

Draw your own conclusions, but I will say JAKKS is definitely going to have a happy holidays.

***Don’t forget to watch this weekend’s Smart Trading Action Alert: Smart Trading Action Alert: Given the beating some blue chips have taken in recent weeks, select small-cap stocks now provide opportunities for safe profits. Ian Cooper explains.

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Posted by Stephanie Grimmett · Filed Under US Stocks and Markets 

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