With so many news about toy stores having trouble, this is quite impressive. LEGO is planning to open 160 stores around the world by the end of the year.
Most of these stores will open in Asia. In fact, LEGO plans to have 140 stores open in 35 cities in China alone. The company also wants to expand into India.
“We want to ensure that we stay really relevant even though there will be changes in the retail landscape. We still need kids to discover LEGO. It’s about making sure we have the right access to kids,” says Niels Christiansen, LEGO’s CEO.
The company says it has used the demise of Toys R Us as a lesson. So it plans to increase its physical stores by 40% in the next year.
“We have the ambition of getting to as many kids as we can around the world, and getting to that means we have to keep gaining market share. We would rather do the investments upfront to be leading that change,” added Christiansen.
“Within 10 years, there will be 100m kids in India living in middle-class families. They ar strong into education and products like LEGO are very high on the wish list. The idea would be to get on some kinds of journey like we are on in China.”
The company also says it will continue to invest in new products. One of them is LEGO Hidden Side. It will also offer a VIP loyalty platform for all of its websites and services and will continue to invest in e-commerce. In short, LEGO is planning some very big moves in order to continue to stay on the top of its game.
