IDW Media Holding reported a significant sales decline, which it attributed to the impact of the Diamond Comic Distributors bankruptcy and titles that didn’t perform as expected, but had increased profits in its fiscal Q3 ended July 31, 2025.
The sales decline was around 8% to $6.7 million in the 2025 quarter, compared to $7.3 million in the same quarter in 2024. Comic sales were down $1.1 million due to underperformance of licensed comic titles relative to expectations and the impact of the Diamond bankruptcy, the company said, offset by a $561,000 jump in book market sales due to a few perennial titles, an increase of $188,000 in direct-to-consumer sales, and other changes.
Profits more than doubled, to $281,000 for the quarter in 2025, vs. $124,000 in the year ago quarter, behind improved margin and reduced expenses. The margin improvements were attributed, in part, to lower write-offs for obsolete inventory in the current quarter than in the year-ago quarter.
IDW revealed a little more detail about its losses from the Diamond Comic Distributors write-off, which it estimated at just under $750,000 last quarter (see “Diamond Bankruptcy Impacts“). That amount is the IDW share of the $850,000 Diamond owed Penguin Random House Publisher Services for purchases of IDW product as a sub-distributor, which indicates to us that the PRHPS contracts provide that the publisher takes the receivables loss for unpaid debt, except for the PRHPS mark-up portion of the sale.
One other tidbit: IDW is now planning to develop roleplaying games based on its properties as one part of a plan to expand the types of products carrying its brands, which could include “…sneakers or hockey jerseys or a cruise,… anything is on the table,” the company said in the conference call.
Source: ICv2
