LEGO to announce 2018 results tomorrow
Posted by Huw,
The LEGO Group will be publishing its annual result for 2018 tomorrow morning. We are expecting a press release at 9am CET followed by a presentation by company CEO Niels B. Christiansen at a press conference at the LEGO House at 10:30 CET (9:30 GMT)
CapnRex101 and I are in Billund and we'll be reporting from the event in the morning.
You'll be able to watch a live stream of proceedings should you wish to.
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And expecting another great year just like last year!
Well we did have a couple things that were...just...yuck.
But! Other than that!!
Too bad, I'll be busy watching the Pokémon Direct then. Lol.
Basically the State of the Union for all Lego fans.
Sounds cool! I'm also off to the LEGO House this year but only in a couple months.
I've been waiting for forever for them to admit that Harry Potter outsold Star Wars, at least in the second half of the year. I can't wait .
As a privately held company they don't really need to tell us any of this, right? So it's extra nice of them to share since nobody made them?
While profits will be great LEGO will still find an excuse to fire several thousand people all the while wondering why their 'wall with minifigure' sets don't sell better than they do.
I think the best anyone can hope for is “the results aren’t as bad as expected, all things considered”. I mean they lost 25%+ of their retail shelf space in North America, and had to write down TRU’s outstanding debt. Plus Star Wars sales sucked for every merchant. No matter how you slice it, it’s not been a great year. But LEGO does seem to be in a stronger recovery position than any other toy vendor.
"While profits will be great LEGO will still find an excuse to fire several thousand people all the while wondering why their 'wall with minifigure' sets don't sell better than they do."
I shouldn't have laughed at this but I did. Some of their small diorama sets are delightful. I've loved most of their seasonal sets, for example.
But, yeah, there are far too many sets that look like a 'wall with some minifigures'
D-day again already, good luck Lego employees
How can I watch this tommorow just wondering
@David1985 Wall of Minifigures?
@LegosRNoice - a lot of sets seem to be a bunch of minifigs with a random small bit of scenery
@guachi: I mean, it's not like such sets are a new thing. While there's some truth to the complaints that sets like 70591-1 75972-1, 76088-1, 76103-1, and 79007-1 are fairly flat and insubstantial, the same can just as easily describe many classic sets like 6040-1, 6059-1, 6062-1, 6259-1, 6263-1, and 6350-1.
Plus, if sets like that didn't sell well, then I doubt they'd have become enough of a pattern in the first place for us to be able to think of them as such a broad category in the first place.
Anyway, not sure what to expect in terms of results and definitely awaiting further insights, though for what it's worth, LEGO Systems, Inc. (the LEGO Group's US branch) reported fairly stable results in their Toy Fair press release — something they have typically kept mum about in years when global LEGO sales have been less stellar: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lego-systems-builds-on-momentum-with-key-2019-launches-300796380.html So I suspect that in the very least, the results will be stronger than what we saw over the past couple years.
I don't think there's much need to worry about massive layoffs, since that really only seemed to happen in 2017 due to LEGO having to dial back after a multi-year hiring binge. Whereas since then, I don't really get the sense that they've been banking on the kind of reliable year-on-year growth that motivated them to ramp up their hiring in the first place.
Pretty much the only new set I bought for the last 4 months of last year was the Hogwarts Castle set, so that says a lot about how my spending habits have changed, as a Lego Star Wars fan. In the UK it feels like you have to take a mortgage out to buy even a smaller Star Wars set these days, and the number applied to the UK price in the middling brackets is often higher than the US ones, before currency conversion has even taken place!
Actually, I’m pretty sure I know what the lowest seller in the UK would’ve been last year - the Unikitty theme. Locking it down to Tesco only, making the blind bags so blind that you literally don’t know what you’re getting and making the UK prices sky high did not do it any favours (Party Time was the most outrageously priced Lego set i’ve ever seen in the UK - I don’t know who thought - “that small cake table will sell for £40!”).
Have to remember TLG’s profits are not necessarily directly impacted by the consumer though. Their primary market is actually the retailers who sell the Lego - so the products just have to appeal to them to make the investment. Hoping retailers were excited by The Hidden Side!
Got a copy of the speech ahead of time. Just leaked.
Bricks alone move the wheels of history!
Have you ever asked yourselves in an hour of building, which everyone finds during the day, how long we have been striving for greatness?
Not only the years we've been at war, the war of the interlocking toy brick. But from the moment as a child, when we realized that the world could have much higher clutch power. It has been a lifetime struggle, a never ending fight, I say to you and you will understand that it is a privilege to create evenly spaced tubes on the inside of each brick. The tubes on the bottom interlock with the studs on top of other bricks. The studs get neatly wedged in between the tubes and the sides of every brick, making them stick together firmly.
We are warriors!
LEGO builders of the world, I ask you once more, rise and be worthy of this historical hour. No brick revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.
Some people will tell you LEGO is a bad word. They'll conjure up images of furrys and bronys, and door to door charlatans. This is our duty to change their perception. I say LEGO men and women of the world unite. We must never acquiesce, for it is together that we build.
We must never cede control of the Legoland. For it is together that we build!
Wait for thunderous applause, bang fist on podium, laugh maniacally.
I think lego is making the same mistake that landed them in trouble last time: Loads and loads of new moulds and forgetting the core play feature that LEGO basically is and instead adding action feature upon action feature, dumbing down the build process to the extreme.
They have so many good ideas, but they just appear in single polybags, like 40303-1 or the Xtra line - they could blend themes, producing Ninjago-ifiers for City sets, thereby taking the building experience to a new level. (Like they did with the first LEGO movie.) - When they release free stickers in stores - why aren't these sized to fit bricks? It somehow seems that they've forgotten the building-part of LEGO.
The money they saved on packaging design also really shows.