Internet sales and product innovations were booming. Employment offensive planned.
The corona crisis is giving the toy manufacturer Lego wings. For the first time since 2017, the Danish company achieved double-digit sales growth again last year. “We are seeing that more families are building together (with Lego) at home,” said CEO Niels B. Christiansen on Wednesday to the Reuters news agency. Further digitization of the business is planned, for which there should be an employment offensive.
Corona has accelerated the trends that have emerged in recent years. The family company's investments, for example in internet sales and product innovations, came just in time for the pandemic and paid off in 2020. Lego.com registered more than twice as many visitors.
Profit increase of 19 percent
Because schools were closed and contacts were restricted, many children had to rely on their own four walls to play; parents were more at home because of the trend towards home offices. Lego sales rose in 2020 by 13 percent to 43.7 billion Danish kroner (5.9 billion euros), and operating profit even rose by 19 percent to 12.9 billion kroner, as the company announced.
Christiansen was brought in in 2017 after Lego's decade-long streak stalled. Under his leadership, the company invested in online business and developed new variants of its game pieces, such as robots that can be programmed using smartphones.
120 new stores for 2021
The CEO wants to hire a few hundred employees who should also advance digitization this year. The shops should not be neglected: 134 new shops were opened in 2020, 91 of them in China. In the current year 80 are to be added in China alone and 120 worldwide.
Not all toy manufacturers benefited from the crisis: The “Barbie” manufacturer Mattel grew by two percent net in 2020, the Hasbro group, known for “Monopoly”, lost eight percent in sales. Christiansen said Lego increased its world market share by about one percentage point in 2020.
