Lego is increasing investment in new products such as software-enabled bricks and sustainability as the world’s largest toy group tries to sustain a period of stellar revenue and profit growth. The Danish family-owned company on Tuesday reported an increase in revenue of more than a fifth to a record DKr42bn ($6.6bn) in the first half of the year, as net profit increased by a third to DKr8.6bn. Niels Christiansen, who became chief executive in 2017, told the FT that Lego was taking market share in almost all countries and had “pretty broad-based” growth through new products including sets based on the football World Cup, Formula 1, and Pokémon. Lego enjoyed rapid growth in the decade after its brush with bankruptcy in 2004. But the company grew too quickly and became too complex, ending in a sales drop in 2017.

“We are really upping our investments,” said Christiansen. “That is really the best insurance against what happened before. If you forget to invest at the right rate, you may run out of steam sometime,” he added. The maker of plastic bricks has tripled the number of software engineers it employs and has launched a new ‘smart brick’ system — first used in sets of Star Wars and Pokémon — to make play more digital and interactive. The company is gradually introducing the smart brick — which can produce sounds and interactive play special effects — into more products, and Christiansen said more functionality would be revealed over time. Lego has become one of Europe’s most successful privately owned businesses by vastly expanding its product range, attempting in recent years to attract more girls and adults to its building sets.

The toymaker upped its investments in production facilities by about 10 per cent to DKr4.6bn in the first half and also spent DKr1.9bn buying Lego Discovery Centres from Merlin Entertainments, which operates the Legoland theme parks. The group is building a new factory in the US to add to a recently opened facility in Vietnam and expansions in China, Hungary and Denmark. It produces all plastic bricks itself — and is investing heavily in recycled material to replace virgin fossil-fuel-based substances without passing the costs on to consumers — meaning that it has to watch its own capacity closely. Christiansen noted that Lego had increased sales almost threefold in the past decade but added, “we don’t feel like we have hit a ceiling, there are many other opportunities.”