Numlock News: August 28, 2025 • Lego, Manga, Bill Belichick
By Walt Hickey
Deluxe
While sales of print manga have been in decline in Japan for some time, the industry is still bolstered by robust sales abroad. Those numbers reached 224 billion yen (US$1.52 billion) as of 2022, about equal to domestic sales. Analysts have been seeing the particular trend of deluxe editions, which often come with more luxurious bindings, performing especially well, particularly in markets like France. In the United States, even amid a decline in total units sold, manga sales revenue was nevertheless up because of these higher-value deluxe editions and box sets. The international business is a crucial market for manga; one agency, Tuttle-Mori, accounts for about 60 percent of the translation publishing market, representing 80 manga publishers in negotiations with 120 publishers in other territories.
Richardson Handjaja, Animenomics
Belichick
The University of North Carolina head football coach, Bill Belichick (a man generally understood to be among the greatest football minds of his generation), and his companion Jordon Hudson have filed 17 different trademarks through their company. Some of these are phrases associated with Belichick, including “Chapel Bill,” “Belestrator” and “The Belichick Way,” as well as the somewhat off-putting “Trail of Salty Tears” and the generic hustlebro idiom of “No Days Off.” Among the phrases that the firm — controlled by the 73-year-old former New England coach and the 24-year-old former cheerleader — wants to trademark is “Gold Digger,” which would be used on jewelry and keychains. It’s not uncommon for iconic NFL coaches to spend their later years in somewhat embarrassing circumstances in Southern climes, but I have to say that humiliation more typically takes the form of a few seasons with the Jacksonville Jaguars.
LEGO
Revenue at LEGO reached 34.6 billion Danish krone (US$5.08 billion), which was up 12 percent year over year — a banner performance from the Danish toymaker. Product fatigue does not appear to be a problem; The LEGO Group launched 314 new sets in the first half of the year, a new record, adding new licenses to their roster such as Bluey, Formula 1 and One Piece. Its Botanicals product line proved to be a solid performer around gift-giving holidays, and the key metrics on nerve endings destroyed after stepping on a LEGO discarded carelessly on the carpet remained satisfactorily high for Wall Street.
Oil
An intensifying drone campaign from its Ukrainian adversaries has caused serious problems for Russia’s domestic oil industry, with attacks against refineries within Russia taking 13 percent of the country’s fuel production offline. That’s bad for Russia, a country that famously has very little else going on economically beyond extracting oil out of the ground. Further attacks have disabled parts of the rail networks and airports, forcing increased vehicle travel. That has, in turn, sent the wholesale price of 95-octane gasoline up 45 percent this year, even as the global price of crude oil is down significantly.
Yaroslav Trofimov and Georgi Kantchev, The Wall Street Journal
Gerontocracy
There are lots of built-in systemic reasons that older members of Congress have structural advantages electorally and significant incentives to stay, and that remains the case this time around. There are 50 members of Congress over the age of 75 who are up for reelection, and about 70 percent have said they intend to run again. Of that group, 70 percent are Democrats, which makes sense; I mean, why hang it up when you’re simply crushing it and at the top of your game?
Airlines
Labor Day Weekend is poised to be a major event for travel, with the TSA reporting it expects to screen 17.4 million people between Thursday and September 3. If it bears out, that would be the largest Labor Day weekend in 15 years. This will be a significant milestone for the TSA. The agency will celebrate the occasion by holding arbitrary and conflicting standards of what exactly needs to go into a bin on any given day at any given airport security line, as well as by having either highly strong or incredibly blasé rules for whether or not a passenger will need to remove a laptop from a bag before placing it in a bin. Not to mention the entirely randomized vibes going from airport line to airport line, where one agent at any given checkpoint has a completely out-of-place level of belligerence towards people quietly standing in line, given the nature of the task at hand. Congratulations to the 17.4 million people who get to be a part of it.
Soy
The start of the U.S. export season for soybeans will begin imminently, and the news from the top global importer of the crop is that the country has ordered exactly zero tons of soybeans. China and the U.S. are having trade hostilities that have resulted in the major importer putting in zero orders whatsoever. Mills that crush soybeans into animal feed in China usually book well ahead in order to secure better prices. By mid-August of 2024, China had bought 2 million tons; at this point in the 2023 season, they bought 5.1 million tons. As recently as the 2020 season, China had booked 11.9 million tons. One beneficiary is Brazil, a country in the southern hemisphere with the opposite growing season, and which still had 37 million tons leftover as of August 5 to sell.
Hallie Gu and Clarice Couto, Bloomberg
Sports
The total amount of revenue made by the television industry is projected to come to $213 billion this year, up 24 percent from $172 billion just 10 years ago. While revenue is up, so are costs, and so is one kind of cost in particular: sports rights. This year, media spending on live sports rights will reach $30.5 billion, which has increased by an eye-watering 122 percent compared to the $13.8 billion spent on the rights in 2015. That means that 14 percent of all the money coming in the door of the television business goes into paying for sports rights, up from 8 percent in 2015.
Eric Gruenwedel, Media Play News
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