The numbers: Move over, Barbie. Lego reported a 11% jump in sales in the first half of the year, compared with the previous year. The sales, worth 11.5 billion Danish krone ($2 billion), beat Mattel’s result for the same period, making the privately-held Danish company the world’s largest toymaker by revenue. Lego’s operating profit jumped by 12% in the first six months of the year.
The takeaway: The LEGO Movie was a “significant contributor” to the company’s latest results, it said. The animated film has made nearly $470 million at the box office so far, and moviegoers are clearly buying lots of related merchandise. Lego’s sales in China jumped by 50% in the first half of the year, the company said.
What’s interesting: Whether Lego can maintain its lead on Mattel will depend on whether kids will keep pumping their parents for movie-inspired merchandise into the crucial Christmas buying season. A busy slate of video game releases should keep sales ticking over in the meantime, the company hopes—it broke ground on its first factory in China a few months ago, as well as boosting capacity at plants in the Czech Republic and Mexico.
