Lego is the Biggest Toymaker in the World.

Yep, according to this Guardian article, Lego is the biggest toymaking business in the world.

It's quite a remarkable story actually, as the once ailing corporation has made such a big turn around that it has quadrupled its revenues in less than 10 years, making it bigger than Mattel (the maker of Barbie), the next biggest rival toymaking corporation.

How has it accomplished such a feat? As the article points out, it boils down to simple profitability - Lego can take one kg of plastic that costs less than $1 and then package that plastic into sets that it then sells for $75 per kg. You have to be an idiot to fail with a business model like that.

Frankly, I'm not surprised that their profits are so high. Over at my household, we've been diving into Legos and the price of these sets is intimidating - especially for what you get. My youngest just had a birthday where she received a few Lego sets, and I have to say, as much of a fan of Legos as I am, with a soft spot in my heart based on loving them as a child, it is kind of shocking the paltry amount of plastic bricks Lego sells for $15 or $20 dollars. These sets are small, as in you don't get a lot of pieces, and the pieces you do get are tiny.

I could go on and on about why I think Lego overprices their stuff, but let's just say that they make an excellent example of toy miniaturization taken to absurd levels that I talked about in a recent post about ripoff toys.

For example, I saw my daughter struggling - even with her tiny fingers - to take a Lego composed of one single square bit of plastic that was meant to represent a piece of food and place into a slightly larger teeny tiny food bin. Anyone want to take any guesses as to how long it will be before this tiny single square Lego brick is lost forever, vacuumed or swept up or lodged in some nook or cranny in the floorboards? The set had a lot of teeny tiny single square pieces.

On a more positive note, I hope that Lego designers and marketers are getting good salaries for the value that they add to these piles of plastic! They're the true heroes here.