Pawtucket-based Hasbro Inc., the world’s second-largest toymaker, said yesterday profit jumped 62 percent, exceeding analysts’ estimates, on sales of Transformers and Spider-Man 3 movie action figures and a tax benefit...

...“Transformers and Littlest Pet Shop may be the strongest boys’ and girls’ brands respectively in the toy industry right now,” Gerrick Johnson, an analyst at New York’s BMO Capital Markets, wrote yesterday in an e-mail. “Hasbro may be in better shape than Mattel this holiday season because of the strength of its business as well as the lack of recalls.”