3 charts for you today:
This week Lego, which was first founded in 1932, reported that its revenues had grown 46% in the first half of this year. That's the kind of growth usually associated with tech companies or early-stage startups — not 91 year-old plastic toy brickmakers.
Brick by brick
For Lego, those remarkable results are partly down to a pandemic bump (nothing quite says "indoor activity" like building Lego), but also 15+ years of a new strategic direction.
For the first 66 years of its life, Lego never posted a loss, but by 2003 the company was in a lot of trouble. Indebted, with sales declining, Lego needed to make some changes. They decided to embrace their fans, young or old, and diversify away from the humble brick.
They gave people the ability to design their own Lego model and then buy the elements required to build it. They made Lego movies. They made Lego video games. Sold Lego city replicas. They started a YouTube channel (which now has 16 billion views). They built new Legoland theme parks (there are now 8 in total) and opened more interactive stores, shaping the entire Lego experience for fans.
But perhaps their biggest stroke of genius was to start engaging more with other brands and IP. Star Wars Lego. Marvel Lego. Harry Potter Lego. Super Mario Lego. Disney Lego. Batman Lego. The list goes on and on of mega franchise IP that Lego has tapped into — routinely charging $100, $200 or even $500, for some of the highest profile sets.
Lego is named after a Danish phrase "leg godt" — meaning "play well" — and play well they have.
The single issue political party the "Rent Is Too Damn High Party" have some work to do. According to data from Zumper, the median rent for a 2-bedroom apartment is up 13% on last year in the US, with rents rising in 80 of the 100 most populous cities.
Some of the biggest rent increases have been in cities that are generally more spacious and affordable. In the Phoenix area of Arizona, rents are up 15-20% in a number of suburbs, while rents in Henderson, a city near Las Vegas, have risen 24% in the last 12 months.
Even New York and San Francisco, which have topped the table of most expensive rents for a long time, have seen prices go up, with the median 2-bed apartment in San Francisco likely to set you back almost $4,000 a month. So much for remote work crushing rental prices.
But rents didn't rise everywhere, if you're looking for a cheaper place to live check out the full data and report here.
Zoom has officially given up on its $15bn deal with Five9 — a cloud contact center that it initially reached an agreement to purchase in July.
The deal fell through after Five9's shareholders voted against the acquisition, marking another blow to Zoom which has had something of a tougher time in 2021 than it had in 2020.
Five9 shareholders were promised roughly 55 Zoom shares for every 100 of their Five9 shares. The problem is that since the deal was first slated, those 55 Zoom shares are now worth about 25% less than they used to be worth — making the deal substantially less attractive.
Great expectations
As we turned to Zoom for work, trivia quizzes, murder mystery nights, weekly catch-ups and just about everything else during the start of the pandemic, investors expected Zoom's financial performance to explode. And it really did —just apparently not enough to meet those lofty expectations.
1) Dollar Tree, the chain of stores that have almost everything for just $1, is giving up the game — announcing that it will begin to sell products for more than a dollar.
2) A prison riot in Ecuador has seen 118 inmates lose their lives, as prisoners used firearms and explosives throughout the violence on Tuesday.
3) When does summer officially start and end? According to this great data viz from Neil Kaye, the warmest 3-month period is usually June 13th to September 12th (at least in the UK).
4) Over 2,000 businesses around the world rely on Sisense for game-changing business insights. Find out why they trust Sisense to go beyond business intelligence to infuse analytics everywhere.**
5) Glasses retailer Warby Parker debuted on the stock market on Wednesday, fetching a valuation of more than $6bn, despite selling only $394m worth of glasses (at a loss) last year.
**This is a sponsored snack.
