Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz is leaving after a rough year at the toy giant — with Barbie sales deteriorating and Wall Street analysts saying a leadership change is overdue.
The 60-year-old Kreiz is taking a senior leadership role at another public company — possibly Paramount Skydance, sources told The Post on Wednesday — while Conde Nast’s Roger Lynch succeeds Kreiz at Mattel on Oct. 2.
Mattel’s board said in a statement that it had conducted a “comprehensive succession planning process” ahead of replacing Kreiz with Lynch, who has has been a board director at Mattel since 2018.
Kreiz started out strong — cutting costs, closing factories and investing in the company intellectual properties — but Mattel’s sales growth for the past several years has been stagnant, analysts noted.
Sales of its hottest brand, Barbie, have been declining since the 2023 blockbuster Warner Brothers’ movie starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
“We think the leadership change is overdue,” Morningstar analyst Jaime Katz wrote in a Wednesday research note.
Mattel shares “have done a round trip under Kreiz’s tenure, roughly doubling to the mid-$20 range before falling back to around $13, where [they] currently trade,” Katz wrote. “Kreiz’s strategy to establish Mattel as an IP-driven, high performing toy company has largely fallen flat.”
“There have been five years of sales that were at the same exact level, through 2025,” Katz added. “The Barbie movie didn’t really change anything.”
Prior to Mattel, Kreiz, who was born and raised in Israel, was chairman and CEO of Maker Studios, which makes short-form videos and he was CEO of Endemol Group, an independent television production company and owner of such franchises as “Big Brother.”
His eight-year tenure was tarnished this year when Mattel unexpectedly lowered its earnings projections for the year in February after reaffirming the company’s positive guidance in early December, according to Seaport Research analyst Gerrick Johnson.
“Mattel lost all of its credibility with Wall Street when it missed its numbers in the fourth quarter and provided guidance significantly below what the street expected,” Johnson said. “They added a lot of uncertainty to the investment.”
Mattel’s shares have declined 35% year to date.
Under Kreiz, the El Segundo, Calif.-based company leaned heavily into entertainment investments, expanding its prominent brands including Hot Wheels, Barbie, American Girl, Uno and Fisher Price, into movies, digital games and live experiences, the company said.
At the same time, Mattel was under increasing pressure to improve its financial performance.
In May, activist investor SouthEastern Asset Management, which controls about 4% of the company’s shares, put out a public letter urging the company to sell itself.
“Private equity buyers have circled Mattel in the last few years,” according to the SouthEastern letter, which flagged rival Hasbro as the most logical choice for a merger.
“We know that Mattel and Hasbro have engaged in on-and-off talks for decades. At the moment, a deal between the two companies is possible in our view,” according to the letter.
“Hasbro has done a better job executing on digital growth than Mattel and therefore has more credibility in this important part of the business.”
In fact, Hasbro and other toy companies are succeeding where Mattel is faltering, according to Johnson.
The company is not capitalizing on some of the hottest toy trends at the moment, which include slime, squishy toys and cosmetics, according to Johnson.
Mattel’s hottest brand is Hot Wheels, which has eclipsed Barbie growth, growing 16% to $723 million during the first half of the year, fueled by the trend of adults buying collectibles.
“I’d rather see a toy guy in there,” Johnson said. “Toys are the engine that drives it all.”
Katz noted that Lynch “has implicitly supported Kreiz’s strategies.”
After the leadership announcement Mattel’s shares were down by more than 5% late morning.
