Simba Dickie Group
The Simba Dickie Group is a German toy manufacturer. Originally born as the product of a merger between Simba Toys and Dickie Toys (two relatively small companies which primarily released budget toys), they have since become a major international conglomerate, acquiring many other famous toy companies in the European market like French die-cast model manufacturer Majorette in 2010, German railway model manufacturer Märklin in 2013, and eventually expanding abroad with the acquisition of American model car manufacturer Jada Toys in 2019.
Simba Dickie has released various merchandise for the Transformers brand through its Dickie Toys subsidiary, starting with tie-ins to 2015's Robots in Disguise and continuing up to The Last Knight and Bumblebee. Although Dickie no longer produces Transformers merchandise, Jada Toys began making die-cast vehicles for the franchise in 2017 and have continued doing so since Simba Dickie acquired them in 2019, thus; the group remains affiliated with Hasbro and the Transformers brand.
They also released a staggering amount of Transformers knockoffs before starting their collaboration with Hasbro, so oops.
Overview
Simba Toys was first founded in 1982, whereas Dickie Toys had already existed as far back as the 1970s. They merged in 1993 but remained relatively small up until their mass streak of progressively bigger brand acquisitions in the 2010s, with the company's products being primarily relegated to budget toy aisles in Europe throughout most of the 90s and 2000s.
One of Simba's longest-spanning toylines is Planet Fighter, a series of cheap rebranded toys developed by other manufacturers (mostly of the Chinese variety) with an overarching sci-fi theme. These included laser blasters, "laser swords", a multitude of toy robots and inevitably, by extension, a lot of transforming toy robots. You could find amongst the latter an oversized version of Armada Megatron (also released in the United States by Happy Well), oversized versions of the Energon Saber Mini-Cons, a handful of dinosaur-based Transformers toys which share their engineering with Beast Wars Dinobot (the same toys that would also be later released by Estrela in Brazil), and many, many, many variants of the Jumpstarter molds [1], plus possibly countless others whose records have simply been lost to time.
You might have expected Simba to try and sweep this under the rug as they entered the 2010s and gained more legitimate partners in the toy industry like Hasbro, but surprisingly, they've kept the Planet Fighter series of toys going throughout the following decades, and although it has been mostly stripped of bootleg figures, they are still to this day manufacturing copies of their Jumpstarter clones (seemingly having been heavily retooled in-house over the years) and selling them on their own website [2] - the same website where you can also buy legitimate Transformers-branded Jada Toys products from!
Merchandise
Robots in Disguise
The Last Knight
Bumblebee
Jada Toys
As previously mentioned, Jada Toys was acquired by Simba Dickie in 2019, but they had been making Transformers merchandise since 2017. Jada's offerings are, thus, covered in their own separate article.
