What the hell are they doing?!?
So Diamond declared bankruptcy in January, right? That basically means that they have more debt than they'll be able to pay off. So they put the company up for sale. Someone could buy everything that Diamond owns, but they'd also be liable for that debt. Diamond was put up for auction and it was bought by Ad Populum. (I am waaaaay over-simplifying this for the sake of getting to my actual point more quickly.)
Typically, there are two reasons that one company would buy another. The first is to gain their assets for extended use. That might be because they have material (which could take the form of raw materials, finished products, intellectual property, or just data) the larger company wants for their own business; that might be because they are a competitive threat and buying them allows the larger company to literally own the competition; that might be because the CEO of the larger company always just thought it might be fun to run a newspaper. (That's a Citizen Kane reference, not a Jeff Bezos one.)
The second reason one company might buy another is to sell it. They typically will fire a bunch of employees, switch to inferior materials (maybe more 'filler' for real world items, maybe trying to wrangle AI to do the bulk of the creative work), sell off some of the key assets under the guise of "returning to core competencies," and try to run the business as bare bones as possible for a couple years before turning around and selling it to someone else. The idea is that they try to get rid of some of the major ongoing expenditures to bring costs down, but sell the company quickly before customers turn sour on the inferior goods/service. It makes the company look good on paper for a very brief time, and the goal is to sell during that small window. It's kind of the business equivalent of house flipping; putting in just the smallest amount of work to make everything look good superficially but without addressing any of the serious structural issues.
At first, I thought Ad Populum was taking this second approach; they fired a bunch of employees on Day One. Normally, this is done a couple months after the purchase to give time to the larger company to identify who they can get rid of and hurt the business the least. If you're firing a bunch of employees as quickly as Ad Populum did, that means they put very little consideration into who does what and just got rid of whole departments and/or anyone drawing a salary of more than an arbitrary dollar figure.
What next sturck me as odd is that they just shut down Diamond Select Toys. They haven't sold off that part of the company, which has existing inventory as well as deals for future products already in the pipeline. There was most definitely some value in all that, and Ad Populum effectively just chucked it in the garbage.
They then cancelled all orders set for after next week. Not rescheduled to a later date. Not delayed until further notice. Not even just canceling for a couple weeks while we sort out the warehousing situation. Everything canceled, full stop. That included material from Marvel, Dark Horse, Tokyopop, IDW, Kodansha... every company that had an agreement with Penguin Random House basically. They didn't even offer short-term suggestions for getting products through alternate means. Just "June 25 or later? Nope." They just effectively killed their entire business. If they're cancelling orders on major publishers' work like that, why would any retailer trust to order from them again? All the retailers that continued to order, for example, Marvel comics from them -- probably out habit/inertia -- now have to scramble to another distributor. They have to do some hard work they were hoping to avoid. Now that Diamond is forcing them to do it, what's their incentive to return?
They've also axed their no-cost reorder service, they've cut retailers off from any data of any sort that they might've used to operate their businesses better, and in fact they seem to have cut off communications altogether -- publishers are hearing nothing, not to mention they're not being paid for anything sold since Ad Populum bought Diamond, and reporters (like industry stalwarts Heidi Macdonald and Rich Johnston, mind you, not just any yahoo with a blog) aren't getting any responses either.
In short, they seem to be doing everything they can to run the business into the ground. I honestly don't know what they might do differently if that was indeed their deliberate intention. I mean, if they had strip-mined the company's assets -- sold off Diamond Select, subcontracted distribution work to a cheap third-party, canceled the lowest profit contracts, etc. -- they would still have some measure of value in the Diamond brand and logo. Diamond was literally THE comics distributor for the entire country for three decades; that name and identity carries some value to it even with the bankruptcy. Well, "carried (past tense) some value." As I said, their business decisions are royally screwing over their client base to the point where retailers literally have no choice but to run to a competitor.
I can't see what the business angle is here. This is not just incompetency; one or two of these decisions, maybe, but all of them? In so short a time period? Diamond's value is estimated to have dropped by $10 million since January. Ad Populum is making the company worth less and less by the day. I don't think there's a Producers-level scheme possible in this scenario. Maybe it's a limitation of my own imagination, but the only rationale I can come up with for this extended series of phenomonally bad decisions is that someone at Ad Populum is seeking out the most two-dimensional, petty, Snidely-Whiplash-type revenge scheme against someone at Diamond, and they want that person to watch Diamond turn to absolute ash. Which I wouldn't be upset with except that it's hurting thousands of comics retailers and publishers and fans in the process.
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