The company announced plans on Wednesday for a 1.7 million square foot factory in Virginia, which will employ around 1,800 people when completed in 2025. It will be the Danish company’s seventh global factory and second in North America. – the other is located in Monterrey, Mexico.
Its sales jumped 27% last year as new stores opened in China and customers returned to its reopened stores. The family-owned company said it overtook the toy industry in all major markets during the year, when sales of its plastic bricks totaled more than $8 billion.
“More and more families are falling in love with Lego building, and we look forward to making Lego bricks in the United States, one of our biggest markets,” CEO Niels B. Christiansen said in a statement.
Building a plant in the United States also helps the company meet demand here, especially when supply chains are congested and the cost of shipping goods rises amid record fuel prices.
“Our factories are located close to our biggest markets, which shortens the distance our products have to travel,” Lego chief operating officer Carsten Rasmussen said in the statement. “Our new plant in the United States and the increased capacity of our existing site in Mexico means that we will be able to better support long-term growth in the Americas.”
Christiansen also noted that Virginia was chosen for the carbon-neutral plant because it allows them to “build a solar farm that supports our sustainability ambitions and provides easy connections to nationwide transportation networks.”
The company currently employs 2,600 people in the United States and has more than 100 stores.
— Reuters contributed to this report.
