Subject:
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Re: MADE IN CHINA?!?!!?!?! that's IT Lego Re: Lego changes CEO...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.lego, lugnet.general
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Date:
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Fri, 22 Oct 2004 23:34:53 GMT
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Highlighted:
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(details)
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In lugnet.lego, David Eaton wrote:
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Yeah, it does admittedly sound low to me-- where are you getting the cite?
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2-3-03, when 161 waged production workers in Billund were laid off, and 1500
was the number cited as being employed in the affected departments.
2-27-03, when 43 administrators were in Billund were laid off, and 2000 was the
number cited as being employed in the whole Billund organization (meaning they
have about 500 people in administrative or higher positions).
10-27-03, when they announced that one of the Swiss plants would be shut down,
and that there were 130 employees just at that one plant (and it sounds like
that was one of the plants that produced bricks).
Also 10-27-03, where they announced another 257 layoffs in Billund, primarily
in the production ranks.
3-16-04, when they announced about 500 layoffs globally, 1/3 of them from
Denmark.
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Of course, I guess I also didn’t include packaging and shipment, either-- and
that’s not necessarily just the “final” packaging, but shipping to other
areas to be “finally packaged” (assuming that those packaging facilities
don’t also move to China as well).
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Loose bricks would be packed up and shipped to other plants (clearly, since the
Czech plant paints parts, but does not mold them), but if a given plant is
packing the sets, there is no logical reason that I can think of that they
wouldn’t also be packing the cases right afterwards. As it is, while they’ve
been shipping parts to Enfield to be packed locally, early runs of sets are
still shipped fully packed from Denmark to get shelves stocked right away.
After all, it saves having to wait for them to finish packing the loose bricks
that would be coming in on the same shipment, but it’s got to be cheaper to ship
loose bricks from Denmark and pack them here than it is to ship lots of
half-full (or much less, in the case of Spybots). If production moves to China,
labor costs drop quite a bit, so it might be cheaper to have everything packed
there and shut down all of the factories except one in Billund (for
prototyping/design purposes) and Germany (for tooling), leaving places like
Enfield as not much more than warehousing/shipping/marketing outfits.
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Huh! Where’d you hear that? From what I’ve heard it’s been anywhere from 6
months to 5 years for sets and themes (depending on how involved they are),
and usually around 3 years (IIRC I remember hearing that various things like
Legends and standalone models like the Wright Flyer or something are quicker
to production)
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<snip>
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That’s awesome! (or, *should* be awesome if they don’t start dropping even
more quality). Did I miss some uber-cool announcement somewhere? But anyway,
that’d allow for less time for MB to steal their designs and whatnot (which
I’ve heard they’ve done in the past) Hm. I wonder how long it takes MB to do
a product design?
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If you scroll down a bit on
this page, they mention that the development time for product ideas will be cut
by about 50%. The industry standard for major toy companies has been about a
year for quite some time, but I can’t find anything specifically listing
12mo/6mo timeframes. That might be something that I was told during my last Toy
Fair visit, or I might be subconsciously combining the two bits of info (I do
remember that they didn’t have Han Solo ready to display with the new Millennium
Falcon, but they had his dark-blue parka hood). We’ll have a pretty good idea
by the end of next year, once we see exactly how much late-release product was
not shown at NY Toy Fair compared to previous years. Now that they’ve switched
over to a rolling release schedule with new product coming out nearly
year-round, there have always been a couple of sets released way late in the
year that weren’t even mentioned at Toy Fair in February, but they’ve also had
at least a couple sets scheduled for release as late as October. Never anything
from the following November/December/January, though.
I could see, though, that an idea could be bounced around for a few years before
it gets the go-ahead for full-out development, or they might be doing loose
planning well in advance of where they’re actually at (it’s been mentioned on a
few occassions that the BIONICLE story outline was laid out for seven “books”,
the second of which just began with the release of the Metru-themed sets), but
if they’ve been taking 3-6 years to develop each and every set, they very well
deserve to go bankrupt, because there’s no way they can keep up with market
changes with numbers like that. If a line completely flops, you’d have years of
wasted development for sets that wouldn’t then ever be released. And it would
take a few years to pick up the slack in product releases. They’d be
hard-pressed to be able to release Star Wars sets before their associated
movies, since Lucas works on a three-year schedule, with designs being finalized
well into the production process.
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