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Interesting learnings for me from this article: - Lego operates multiple $1B+ factories around the world - they are not just a design and marketing company -
by obblekk 3y ago
Interesting learnings for me from this article:
- Lego operates multiple $1B+ factories around the world - they are not just a design and marketing company
- 1400 manufacturing jobs in Virginia expected - not just an automated thing. Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Particularly compared to MX
- 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No offsets shenanigans. Oil prices might be too high today if this is about to happen to most new factories in the world.
- foobarian 3y agoHow do you mean not particularly sunny? Even Boston is at a similar or lower latitude than Southern Europe, can imagine Virginia being even better for solar.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoHave you ever been to Virginia? Have you compared it to the American southwest for sunshine?
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoIf that’s “not particularly sunny” for solar energy, you would be amazed to see how many solar panels there are in Europe north of Mediterranean countries.
- Mashimo 3y agoYou can find solarfarms in Denmark. Which latitude wise is in the middle of Canada. If there make sense here, why not Virginia? I don't know much about solar panels, but just looking up sunshine hours it seems Virginia has a similar amount as Texas? And more than double as Billund.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 3y agoIt’s highly automated but you still need people to watch the machines. Many Lego factory videos are available. If this lets them source much of the plastic locally, it will save on millions of boxes being shipped across the ocean. That’s a huge reduction in carbon, even if the local manufacturing costs a bit more.
- hanniabu 3y agoLet's not pretend they care about the reduction in carbon. They'd only care about reduced shipping costs.
- nonethewiser 3y agoTheir product is literally made out of oil.
- vidarh 3y agoApparently they've started phasing in pieces made of bio-polyethylene made from sugarcane. But I haven't found anything about what proportion of their bricks that makes up, and presumably they'd be publicising it heavily for PR purposes if it was a large proportion so I'm guessing it's not a very large amount yet.
- dzamo_norton 3y agoIs making bricks out of oil as bad as burning it?
- bobthepanda 3y agoAlso, the general container shortage and supply chain issues over the years have showed that you want to hedge your bets with a global supply chain.
- mupuff1234 3y agoEasy, build a container from Lego.
- iso1631 3y ago> 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No offsets shenanigans. Oil prices might be too high today if this is about to happen to most new factories in the world. No mention of exporting kWh during the summer days and importing during winter nights? Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.
- mlyle 3y ago> No mention of exporting kWh during the summer days and importing during winter nights? Almost certainly a great deal of this. But > > No offsets shenanigans. Means they're not entering some shady arrangement with someone else that is doing green things and doing accounting magic to claim it's about the same. It's much harder to play games when you're talking about netting zero on-site. > Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt. This is becoming much less true in many places with a lot of solar, e.g. California.
- iso1631 3y agoIs California not able to export electricity? The lowest I see in thee last week was 3.1GW of natural gas for CISO. Similar amount to the lowest gas usage last June and July (2.7GW I think on June 19) https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/balancing_authority/CISO https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
- shadowgovt 3y agoIIUC it's complicated. Because the grid is, fundamentally, still storage-starved (though that's been improving in recent years), even with export the CA energy companies run into grid over-saturation problems on clear, sunny days. Eventually losses catch up with you pushing the power geographically far enough; they couldn't, for example, power the entire United States off of enough California solar. So I naively suspect the issue is either exporting just saturates the adjacent grids too or other power companies are loathe to crash their prices by letting their grids saturate and therefore use whatever restrictions are allowed against exporting to keep CA's surplus off their grids.
- rdsnsca 3y agoThey are also the largest manufacturer of rubber tires in the world https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/100909-largest-tyre-manufacture-per-annum https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/100909-la...
- akiselev 3y agoThey're the "largest" manufacturer of tiny little toy car wheels that use a few grams of rubber. It's a paid ad for LEGO, not a serious record.
- munificent 3y agoAs opposed to those serious Guiness records like "farthest eyeball pop", "loudest purr by a domestic cat", "most face flesh tunnels", "most tennis balls held in the mouth (by a dog)", "most eyebrow waxes performed in eight hours by a team", and "longest head massage chain". Guiness has always been a half-commercial silly enterprise. It's literally founded by a beer brand to resolve pub trivia arguments.
- arcanemachiner 3y agoThe point still stands: By no reasonable definition is Lego the largest manufacturer of tires.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago>Oil prices might be too high today if this is about to happen to most new factories in the world. I don't imagine this will have much impact on oil as the solar is offsetting electricity from coal/gas/nuclear/etc.
- dukeyukey 3y ago> Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Particularly compared to MX My understanding is the US: 1. Is more politically, economically, and frankly physically secure than Mexico. 2. Has cheaper energy 3. Has a better-trained manufacturing workforce for the kinds of machine Lego is gonna use.
- GalenErso 3y agoMaybe they just received some good old-fashioned tax incentives? It's not always about geopolitics.
- newjersey 3y agoMy guess is that Lego customers are also increasingly older. I mean look at the millennium falcon. https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/millennium-falcon-75192 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/millennium-falcon-75192 https://i.imgur.com/vsxVnSJ.png https://i.imgur.com/vsxVnSJ.png ages 16+ When I think of fancy lego, I think of something like this https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-medium-creative-brick-box-10696 https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-medium-creative-bric... because it has wheels and stuff, not just bricks. I would have imagined "regular" lego was just different sizes of bricks, not even a sloped "roof" brick or wheels. Also I think "made in USA" might help sales in the US and at the very least calms investors?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- buck4roo 3y agoInvestors? LEGO Group A/S remains privately held by the family that started it in Denmark.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kye 3y agoTax incentives are geopolitics. That's why all the best sci-fi TV shows came out of Vancouver for a while and every movie and TV show for the last several years thanks the state of Georgia.
- sremani 3y agoPlastics - where are they cheap? That is the answer.
- jacquesm 3y agoThe plastics cost are relatively low for this product compared to many other products made of plastic. Lego is first and foremost a marketing machine (which they excel at) before they are an injection molding specialist (which they also excel at). They've had their ups and downs over the years but the value add on 1 KG of ABS to sell for >> $200 is such that the plastic bit is almost an afterthought. Without the StarWars franchise and discovering adults rather than kids as a market Lego would be in an entirely different position today.
- SoftTalker 3y agoDid they discover adults or did those adults just grow up with Lego toys and never stop loving them?
- jacquesm 3y agoMost people from the Lego scene were out of it for a decade or more and then sort of rediscovered it, usually in tandem with their own kids.
- onion2k 3y agoI'd bet a large sum that the price of licensing the Star Wars brand is a greater part of the cost of a Lego Star Wars set than all of the plastic in it.
- jacquesm 3y agoI definitely would not be taking the other side of that bet, you can simply compare the per kg price of the branded sets vs the ones that are 'just' Lego.
- TexanFeller 3y ago> Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Based on prices I've seen shopping for my nephews they seem to be a luxury brand now that can afford to. Lots of elaborate and expensive sets sold for $50-200. In my day they were closer to plain bricks.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoI’ve posted before that Lego in the USA in the 1970s consisted of multi-colored bricks of different sizes. That’s it. And usually someone replies “You’re wrong” and points to some Lego mini-figure or elaborate kit that existed in the US in the 70s but in reality, I never ever saw one and neither me nor any of my friends ever had anything besides basic bricks. It’s like there is some alternate 1970s Lego reality that other children must have lived. Or revisionist history. I think there were jet packs in the 1970s, too. But I never knew anyone who owned one.
- majormajor 3y agoThe 90s are when fancy sets with specialized pieces REALLY took off. The 90s space stuff compared with the 80s was a big shift. But that's still 30 years ago so Lego has been fancy pieces and custom kits for a couple generations of kids now.
- gtop3 3y ago> But that's still 30 years ago so Lego has been fancy pieces and custom kits for a couple generations of kids now. You can get a 790 piece big box of Lego brand plastic building blocks on Amazon for $35. These types of collections tend to end up in yard sells, or passed around extended families because they last longer than a single childhood. The none-fancy Lego branded blocks still exist, and are still a common part of childhood in America. Lego just doesn't have to market them as hard, and the sale volume is naturally lower.
- majormajor 3y ago
- weinzierl 3y agoThey also operate a respectable number of theme parks and hotels around the world. https://www.legoland.com/ https://www.legoland.com/
- Dextro 3y agoIf I remember right, they were forced to sell the theme park business when they were in dire financial straights in the early 00s. While Legoland still exists, it's now a license and the parks owned by a separate company
- fnordpiglet 3y agoVirginia is actually home to enormous amounts of solar. Not the least of which is Amazon production for AWS regions.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No offsets shenanigans. I appreciate no offset shenanigans but did they factor in the fact that their product is made out of petroleum?
- mlindner 3y agoI'd argue this is one of the okay uses for petroleum as it's converted directly into a high value product and not emitted as pollution. I assume people don't do a lot of throwing away of Lego bricks. Going into the future I predict petroleum will be used to make material products a lot longer than it's used to make fuel. Even after we stop mining petroleum we'll still be turning farm crops into the same material.
- nonethewiser 3y agoThat’s a fair point, but it still requires the production of oil and means the material will practically never break down in a landfill.
- mlindner 3y agoYou can make the same material by originating it from crops and it still wouldn't break down. Also the historical alternatives for this material in most applications are aluminum and glass which also will not break down in landfills.
- concordDance 3y agoThe same is true of, say, concrete. Not breaking down in landfill doesn't really matter as long as it doesn't leech pollutants into the water table or somesuch.
- devjab 3y ago> Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). I work with solar, not directly but we turn investor money into solar plants, and part of that is getting the most money out of them as possible. The amount of sun obviously matters, but the temperature matters more. The hotter it gets the less efficient the solarpanels become at generating electricty. The efficiency starts dropping by around 0.5% for every degree celcius above 25 degrees celcius. In hotter climates, you can build solarplants differently, similarly to the one in that james bond movie I believe, not too sure as we don't do that, and I'm obviously not into the engineering part. I mean, I've read the manual of some solarinverters, but that was to get data out of them. Aside from that, solarplanes do actually generate power on cloudy days, not as much, but the only thing that really stop them is snow. The coolest thing about solar, is that it's very predictable. We can basically forecast our budgets for decades to come, because we know exactly how much energy we're going to be producing each month, and with the advances in storage, you'll soon be capable of storing excess power for nights. Anyway, areas with 10-35 degree celcius are often better suited for solar power than hotter areas with more sun. That's not to say you shouldn't build solar in hot areas, but if you're planning where to put your solar powered factory down, you're likely going to take that into account. Along with a range of other things. I'd wager that logistics and taxes were more important for Lego.