Subject:
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Re: Lego Article (Re: I'm famous (or infamous))
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general, lugnet.people
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Date:
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Wed, 6 Oct 1999 18:23:46 GMT
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Viewed:
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109 times
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Hey Joseph,
On the radio interview, you may wish to mention the fact that TLG has sort of
ignores the adult LEGO population. Bulk sales are an example of this. No need to
badmouth the company, just tone it into a polite way of saying that they could do
SOMETHING for the AFOLs, but haven't so far.
TLG checks all media for any articles or interviews about LEGO, and keeps a record
of such events.
Good Luck (or should I use showbiz jargon and say "break a leg"), and let us know
how the interview went.
Gary Istok
P.S. Now you have two things to add to your RTL Roll Call "LEGO Claim to Fame".
Joseph Gonzalez wrote:
> In lugnet.people, Gary R. Istok writes:
> > Hey Joseph, Congratulations!!!
> > > Just a footnote to this little incident. The information came from an
> > > interview I did with a reporter in Denmark for the Bloomberg Newsgroup (like
> > > Associated Press but on a smaller, growing scale) about two months ago. It
> > > was originally for an article about the growth and current status of the
> > > Lego Group (since Bloomberg is mainly interested in business news).
>
> Thanks, Gary.
>
> Here is a copy of the article (portions of it appeared in my statewide
> newspaper's business section today). I'm also supposed to do a little
> interview with a local radio station on Friday.
> THANKS, Poilin!!!
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Lego Uses Clothes and Video Games to Rebuild Empire: Spotlight
>
> Billund, Denmark, Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Some people just
> never grow up. For Lego A/S, the Danish maker of plastic toy
> building blocks, that's a good thing.
> Adult men -- some buying toys for themselves -- account for
> half of Lego's sales, which totaled 7.68 billion kroner ($1
> billion) last year.
> Take Utah state computer administrator Joseph Gonzalez, for
> example. The 34-year-old father of four is a man who knows his
> 6285 Black Seas Barracuda -- a pirate ship model -- from his 6949
> Robo Guardian, which is from the Spyrius space series, of course.
> The self-professed ``Legomaniac'' owns about 300 sets of the
> Danish construction bricks, writes reviews for a host of Lego-fan
> Web sites and refers to forced lulls in his Lego-building career
> as his dark ages.
> ``It did come to a point where my wife was looking at our
> budget and saw how much I was spending on boxes of plastic, and
> she had to take a stand,'' Gonzalez says.
> Gonzalez is just one participant in the cult following the
> plastic bricks have generated in 140 countries since they were
> first produced by Danish joiner Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1949.
> The name Lego derives from ``leg godt,'' Danish for play well.
> Coincidentally, lego also means I put together in Latin.
> In a recent survey on Fibblesnork.com -- an unofficial Lego-
> fan Web site -- 74 percent of about 1,600 respondents said they
> have never considered themselves too old to play with Lego. About
> one in seven of the respondents -- adults and young people -- say
> they each own more than 100,000 bits of Danish plastic.
>
> Block Trade
>
> Somewhere along the line, though, things have gone wrong for
> Lego. Last year, the Danish toymaker posted its first-ever annual
> loss. Asian sales dropped 38 percent because of the region's
> economic troubles.
> Lego's net income fell 150 million kroner below 1998 profit.
> The company, which isn't publicly traded, says it lost a net 194
> million kroner in 1998 compared with a 62 million-kroner profit a
> year earlier. Sales rose just 1 percent from 1997.
> Lego Chief Executive Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen is a grandson of
> founder Ole and Denmark's second-richest man after the shipping
> magnate Maersk McKinney Moeller, according to a ranking published
> last year in the Danish newspaper Borsen.
> Kristiansen says Lego's inability to react to turbulent
> economic times was due to ``too much ballast.'' That ballast is
> presumably the 1,000 employees Lego will fire this year to try to
> put the company back in the black -- part of a move Kristiansen
> calls the Lego fitness program.
> By shedding 10 percent of the workforce, Kristiansen is
> confident Lego can restructure and become flexible enough to take
> on Mattel Inc., Walt Disney Co., Sony Corp. and other competitors
> and boost sales by an average of 1 billion kroner a year.
>
> Powerful Friends
>
> To reach that number, Lego is branching out.
> The company's multimedia unit is publishing CD-ROM games
> based on Lego themes, taking on video games such as those for
> Sony's PlayStation.
> Lego is selling Star Wars products with the permission of
> Lucasfilm Ltd. and Winnie the Pooh toys under license from
> Disney. It also is making Barbie-esque dolls and manufacturing a
> line of colorful kids' clothes a la Benetton Group's 0-12 line of
> apparel.
> Legoland theme parks in the U.K. and California -- and, by
> 2003, in Germany -- echo Lego's original plastic kingdom in its
> home town of Billund, Denmark.
> Lego has also pinned big hopes on the MindStorms Robotics
> Invention System, which is based on a concept by the MediaLab at
> the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The system, which
> costs $200, gives budding engineers the software, microprocessor,
> sensors and Lego blocks they need to build a robot they can then
> program on a personal computer.
>
> Next: Lego Robots
>
> MIT's Lego Papert Professor of Learning Research, Mitchel
> Resnick -- the company sponsors his academic chair -- says Lego's
> research sponsorship will continue, with the aim of making
> smaller, lighter and cheaper robotic systems.
> Eventually, Resnick wants to put a computer processor inside
> Lego bricks, so that one can interact with another. He said he
> sees Lego's future as combining education and entertainment.
> ``Whereas engineering used to be something that was studied
> at university level,'' he said, ``now young kids can learn the
> core concepts.''
> Gonzalez, the adult Lego collector, agrees that the robotics
> system gives kids incredible educational preparation. Still, he's
> not convinced he likes the direction Lego is taking. He likes the
> traditional model sets and usually buys discontinued collectibles
> rather than on new Lego sets.
> ``The simple construction sets of fire stations, castles and
> boats seem to be suffering quite a bit over the past couple of
> years,'' he says. A police station set might once have included
> 300 or 400 pieces but now comes with only a third that number.
> ``Where's the fun in that?'' Gonzalez asks.
> Lego is betting that those good old plastic bricks, combined
> with new, high-tech toys, will provide enough fun to shore up the
> company's foundations.
>
> --Poilin Breathnach in the Copenhagen bureau (45 33) 32 21 21
> rh/ms/
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Lego Article (Re: I'm famous (or infamous))
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| (...) Thanks, Gary. Here is a copy of the article (portions of it appeared in my statewide newspaper's business section today). I'm also supposed to do a little interview with a local radio station on Friday. THANKS, Poilin!!! ---...--- Lego Uses (...) (25 years ago, 6-Oct-99, to lugnet.general, lugnet.people)
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