Ilestedt står över träning

Lina Hurtig är tillbaka. Efter nästan ett års frånvaro kan hon göra comeback i Arsenals Champions League-match mot Vålerengen på onsdag. – Hon har jobbat hårt under en väldigt lång tid, säger Arsenals tillförordnade huvudtränare Renée Slegers.

Svenska landslagsstjärnan Lina Hurtig missar resten av säsongen. Det beskedet ger Arsenals tränare Jonas Eidevall. – Hon är fortfarande borta av personliga skäl och vi måste respektera det, säger han.

Året närmar sig sitt slut och Google publicerar nu sin årliga sammanfattning över de populäraste sökningarna.

Bland nyhetshändelserna dominerar Israels krig i Gaza, med frågor som "Varför krigar Israel och Palestina?".

Men den personliga ekonomin har också satt sin prägel på svenskarnas sökningar. Elstödet rönte stort intresse och många ville veta hur mycket pengar de skulle få.

Det här googlade svenskarna

Sommarens tragiska dödsolycka på Gröna Lund, ryska Wagnergruppen och gängtoppen Kurdiska räven återfinns också på söktrendernas tio-i-topp.

Andra heta ämnen var Marabou, där många svenskar undrade varför man ska bojkotta chokladföretaget. En hel del svenskar ställde sig också frågan "Varför bränner man koranen?".

På underhållningssidan satte countryartisten David Ritschard stort avtryck – i samband med kollapsen i Allsång på Skansen toppade han svenskarnas sökningar av personer.

AI intresserar

Mest eftersökta idrottsprofil var tidigare fotbollsproffset David Beckham, som under året var aktuell med en ny dokumentär. Men damlandslagets framgångar i fotbolls-VM engagerade också med sökningar på landslagsspelarna Zecira Musovic och Lina Hurtig.

2023 tog också svenskarnas intresse för AI fart, enligt Google, vilket visade sig med den grundläggande frågeställningen: “Vad är AI?”.

Även personer som gått ur tiden har haft stort söktryck, bland dem märks programledaren Patrick Grimlund, folkkäre artisten Lasse Berghagen, skådespelaren Matthew Perry och polischefen Mats Löfving.

När Donald Trump var USA:s president införde han högre importskatter än någon annan president gjort på nästan ett århundrade. Hans protektionistiska hållning har spätt på inflationen och gjort USA fattigare. Inte heller har den gynnat landets exportörer, skriver The Economist. Skulle Trump bli president igen skulle det enligt tidningen innebära en protektionistisk mardröm, med upp till en tre gånger så hög genomsnittlig amerikansk importskatt. Höjda importskatter skulle inte bara skada konsumenter och de flesta producenter. De skulle också påverka USA:s relationer med andra länder och riskera att förstöra det globala handelssystemet, anser tidningen. Sequels are always worse than the original By The Economist October 31st, Washington DC Sequels are never as good as the original. And when the original was terrible, there is even more reason to dread the next episode. So it is with “Tariff Man Part Two”. In the White House, Donald Trump put more new tariffs on American imports than any president in nearly a century. His philosophy was simple: “I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so.” Mr Trump’s protectionism made America poorer, did little to help exporters and fed the inflation still raging. If he wins the Republican presidential nomination (a likely outcome) and goes on to win the election (too close to call), he has vowed to ramp up things. He is mulling an across-the-board levy of perhaps 10% on all products entering America. In one fell swoop, his plans would more than triple the average American tariff. The direct costs would be bad enough, with the tariffs functioning as a tax on consumers and hurting most producers. Yet they would also tear at America’s ties with its allies and threaten to wreck the global trade system. To get a sense of the impact, look back. On January 23rd 2018, a year after Mr Trump was sworn in, he got started with tariffs, hitting washing machines and solar panels. A couple of months later he went after aluminium and steel. A few months after that, it was Chinese goods. By 2021 American duties were worth 3% of the country’s total import value, double the level when Mr Trump took office. Tariffs on Chinese imports rose from 3% to 19%, calculates Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think-tank. Mr Trump’s first aim was to slim the trade deficit. He thought tariffs would bludgeon other countries into submission, leading them to rejig policies to America’s advantage. Memorably, he declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But instead of shrinking, the deficit widened. Instead of buckling, China tripled its tariffs on America. Many allies retaliated, too. The consequences were dismal. Industries that were protected by tariffs reaped benefits, enjoying greater market share and fatter profits. Most others suffered. America’s International Trade Commission (usitc), a bipartisan agency, found that industries downstream from tariff-coddled producers faced higher input prices and lower profitability. The Peterson Institute estimated that steel users in effect paid an extra $650,000 per job created in the steel industry. Studies have calculated that almost all the costs have been borne by Americans, rather than foreign producers. The usitc found a near one-to-one increase in the price of American imports in the wake of tariffs on China. Mr Trump’s first aim was to slim the trade deficit. He thought tariffs would bludgeon other countries into submission, leading them to rejig policies to America’s advantage. Memorably, he declared that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But instead of shrinking, the deficit widened. Instead of buckling, China tripled its tariffs on America. Many allies retaliated, too. The consequences were dismal. Industries that were protected by tariffs reaped benefits, enjoying greater market share and fatter profits. Most others suffered. America’s International Trade Commission (usitc), a bipartisan agency, found that industries downstream from tariff-coddled producers faced higher input prices and lower profitability. The Peterson Institute estimated that steel users in effect paid an extra $650,000 per job created in the steel industry. Studies have calculated that almost all the costs have been borne by Americans, rather than foreign producers. The usitc found a near one-to-one increase in the price of American imports in the wake of tariffs on China. Mr Trump did unquestionably succeed in one respect. He helped remake politics. According to a recent survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a think-tank, 66% of Americans think the government should place restrictions on imported foreign goods to protect jobs at home, up from 60% in 2018. On the campaign trail in 2019 Joe Biden criticised tariffs as a costly policy. In power he has rolled them back only a little. The array of levies on China remains intact. Whatever the merits of lifting tariffs, the White House appears fearful of blowback from looking soft on China. At the same time, Mr Biden has concocted an enormous industrial policy, fuelled by more than $1trn in subsidies for electric vehicles, offshore wind, semiconductors and the like. It is a more thoughtful and deliberate approach than Mr Trump’s, but it still looks likely to fail to bring about a manufacturing renaissance, is very expensive and, in lavishing subsidies on American factories, discriminates against other countries. It is, in short, rather Trumpist. How much worse could things get? If Mr Trump wins the presidential election in 2024, the world may discover that the answer is: “Rather a lot.” In August Mr Trump was interviewed on Fox Business, a television channel, by Larry Kudlow, his former economic adviser and a long-time media personality. Mr Trump put forward two ideas. First, all foreign firms selling to America would face a 10% levy. Second, if any country placed a high tariff on anything American, he would hit back with exactly the same tariff. “Call it retribution,” said Mr Trump. “Reciprocity,” interjected Mr Kudlow, using the politer label. The lineage of these ideas can be traced back to thinkers who crafted policy during Mr Trump’s presidency, and who are working on new, more detailed plans. Robert Lighthizer, United States Trade Representative under Mr Trump, recently laid out his vision in a book, “No Trade is Free”. One of his ideas is the universal tariff on all imports, to be used as a lever to bring America’s trade flows into balance, so that the country no longer runs a big deficit. Mr Lighthizer would not limit the tariff to 10%. Rather, he writes, America should impose the levy “at a progressively higher rate year after year until we achieve balance”. Project 2025, a coalition of conservative groups, published a book earlier this year with blueprints for almost every facet of government during a second Trump administration. In the trade chapter, Peter Navarro, another economic adviser to Mr Trump, bemoaned the fact that countries like China and India have higher levies on America’s goods than America does on theirs, arguing that this has led to “systematic exploitation of American farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, and workers”. In principle, reciprocity could be achieved in two ways—either by persuading other countries to lower tariffs or by America raising its own. Mr Navarro leaves no doubt as to his preference. If Mr Trump has his way, other countries will probably respond by slapping their own tariffs on America. The spread of universal tariffs would be akin to a giant tax on cross-border transactions, making international commerce less attractive. Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s hopes of shrinking the trade deficit would run headlong into the economic forces that actually determine the balance of exchanges between countries. In America’s case the crucial factor is the country’s low saving rate, which is almost certain to continue as a result of persistently high consumer spending and widening government deficits. Mr Trump has pointed to one ostensible virtue of his tariffs: they generate income. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, estimates that a 10% tariff may bring in up to $2.5trn in extra revenue during its first decade of implementation, which could be used to reduce America’s budget deficit. But this money could also be brought in by other methods. Raising tariffs simply means picking them as a tax over others such as, say, a higher income or inheritance tax. Every tax has pros (eg, generating public revenue or discouraging bad behaviour) and cons (eg, hurting growth or imposing costs on individuals). The cons of tariffs are big. Ahmad Lashkaripour of Indiana University estimates that a global tariff war would shrink American gdp by about 1%. Most countries would suffer falls closer to 3%. The drag on smaller, trade-reliant economies would be greater still. Tariffs are also regressive since they hurt those on lower incomes twice. They tax more of their spending, by raising the price of consumer goods, and more of their earnings, since many work in industries, such as construction, that face higher material costs. If the bulk of the tariff bill is passed on to American consumers, as occurred with the first round of Mr Trump’s tariffs, a 10% duty would cost each American household about $2,000 per year. The toll from universal tariffs would go beyond their economic impact. International commerce, and the system that enables it, built after the second world war, allows countries to challenge each other’s policies at the World Trade Organisation (wto). But the wto’s role in dispute settlement has been disabled since 2019, when the Trump administration blocked appointments to its appellate body, preventing the institution from making binding rulings. The result is that countries which object to Mr Trump’s tariffs would lack a suitable way to confront them. “The system would fall apart in a much greater way than it did even during his first term,” says Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College. Mr Biden has not been a model free-trader. His industrial policy is built on lavish subsidies that, by incentivising investment in America, are unfair to other countries. Yet even if somewhat hamfisted, he has worked to cobble together supply chains and trade networks that bring America and its allies closer together. This is part of an attempt, still in its infancy, to lessen dependence on China. Mr Trump’s tariffs would reverse Mr Biden’s progress. It would no longer be America and (occasionally reluctant) friends versus China—it would be America versus the world. “Trump would view it as a badge of honour if other countries were upset. He’d say, ‘See, I’m fighting for you and we’re sticking it to them’,” predicts Mr Irwin. Mr Trump would lack outright authority to implement a universal tariff. The constitution gives Congress the power to regulate commerce; the president can intervene only by using special justifications. Mr Trump previously drew on two statutes: section 232 of trade law allows the president to restrict imports in order to protect national security (the dubious basis for tariffs on steel and aluminium); section 301 allows a president to impose tariffs against a country with discriminatory trade behaviour (the more reasonable basis for actions against China). But both require time-consuming investigations, which would cut against the desire of Mr Trump and his advisers for rapid executive actions. Another option would be to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Mr Trump used in 2020 to order the removal of TikTok and WeChat, Chinese social-media goliaths, from American app stores. In this scenario Mr Trump would declare a national emergency and then announce a universal tariff as the response. “It is less clear exactly what national emergency would be declared,” says Jennifer Hillman, a former general counsel with the us Trade Representative. “Perhaps that the trade deficit is threatening American competitiveness? Or that the size of the trade deficit is unsustainable?” Few economists would endorse such thinking. Far from being a weakness, appetite for imports comes from America’s strength. The country has run deficits for the past half-century, a period of economic dominance. More crucially, legal experts would also take a dim view of a declaration. “Trump would be bending the law in a direction that it was never intended to apply,” says Alan Wolff, a veteran of trade law. “There would be court challenges, and they might well be successful.” Reciprocal tariffs might seem tidier, but even an attempt to impose tit-for-tat duties would get messy. Mr Navarro loves to point out that American tariffs on cars are just 2.5%, whereas the European Union charges 10%. What he omits is that America has long placed a 25% tariff on imports of pick-up trucks, not to mention hefty duties on some imports of lumber and some foods. Any line-by-line examination of tariffs would turn up scores of examples where American levies are higher than those of other countries. Indeed, a guiding principle of the wto is that countries can negotiate across different product categories to set tariffs that protect politically sensitive sectors, so long as they keep tariffs down overall. Letting countries hammer out unique tariff regimes is a core part of diplomacy. Pure reciprocity would descend into absurdity. Politically, Mr Trump would also face opposition. Despite his embrace of protectionism, many in the Republican Party are less committed. Consider Project 2025, the coalition drawing up policy plans for Mr Trump’s second term. It is quite clear in all of its positions—except for that on trade. Its chapter on trade is split in two: Mr Navarro’s plea for tariffs is set against a free-trade argument by Kent Lassman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank. Mr Lassman lays out what he dubs a “conservative vision for trade”, calling for tariff cuts to reduce consumer prices, as well as more ambitious trade deals. Mr Trump’s domestic opponents would receive support from abroad. A trade official with an American ally says that his government is braced for tariffs at the start of a new Trump administration, and that he and his colleagues have a damage-limitation playbook, honed during Mr Trump’s four years in office. They would work with firms and politicians in Republican districts that enjoy the benefits of trade—from Iowa’s corn-growers to Tennessee’s car industry—and try to persuade Mr Trump to carve out exceptions. Yet both legal challenges and lobbying would take months, if not longer, to play out. In the meantime, the global trade system would be plunged into uncertainty. Other governments would slap retaliatory tariffs on America. Mr Biden’s work to repair ties with America’s allies would be torn apart. As firms try to assess the risks, they could well turn more cautious in their investment, which would weigh on economic growth. Companies with border-straddling operations would face pressure to retrench. Smaller countries that are dependent on trade would be vulnerable. One of the lessons of Mr Trump’s first stint in the White House is that he can cause great damage with the stroke of a pen, and that the damage is not easily reversed. Most of his tariffs are still on the books. The wto remains neutered. The America-first ethos that he preached, once a fringe preference, is now a force in the political mainstream. The consequences of a second Trump presidency for global trade would be grave and enduring. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

▸ GÖTEBORG. Ingen Lina Hurtig när landslagets samlas. Arsenal-anfallaren är kvar i London, och kan i värsta fall missa…

Det svenska landslaget har samlats inför Nations League-matcherna mot Schweiz och Italien. En som saknas är Lina Hurtig, 28. – Hon kommer vara kvar i Arsenal och rehaba, säger förbundskapten Peter Gerhardsson till SVT Sport.

Arsenalstjärnan Lina Hurtig missar inledningen av veckans landslagssamling i Göteborg på grund av en skada.

Tack vare strategiska investeringar och genomtänkta franchise-lösningar, har danska Lego lyckats susa förbi amerikanska leksakstillverkare som Barbies Mattel och Transformers Hasbro i omsättning. Nu börjar i stället den spretiga underhållningsgiganten Disney bli en värdig måltavla för det familjeägda bolaget från Billund, skriver Financial Times. – Vi måste börja betrakta oss som ett underhållningsvarumärke. Varumärkets egenskaper är mycket mer lika Disneys, styrkorna är mycket mer lika Disneys än någon mer traditionell leksakstillverkare, säger vd Niels Christiansen till tidningen. With a portfolio of toys, movies and theme parks, and booming revenues, the family business has big ambitions By Richard Milne

Financial Times, 16 October 2023 Look closely at Lego’s version of a bonsai tree and you will see that many of the blossoms are made from plastic bricks shaped as pink frogs. Similarly, on its model of the Eiffel Tower, the in-house designers turned to an unusual Lego piece: the hot dog sausage. Jens Kronvold Frederiksen, design director for the Star Wars line at the Danish toymaker, laughs as he details the resourceful, and sometimes just plain comical, ways his colleagues repurpose existing plastic bricks to make new objects and keep costs down. Its popular Botanical Collection — which interprets orchids, wildflowers and bouquets using Lego — reuses pterodactyl wings, robot heads and car bonnets to mimic various parts of nature. Such innovations have propelled the family-owned toymaker to become one of Europe’s biggest corporate success stories of the past decade. Lego, with essentially just one product in endless iterations, has raced past Mattel and Hasbro — the listed US companies with stables of hundreds of different toy brands — to become by far the biggest toymaker in the world by sales, and on a different level altogether in terms of profits. At the same time, Lego quietly completed a transition in its family ownership — the bedrock of the company — this year. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, a former Lego chief executive and main family powerbroker for almost half a century, passed on the mantle to his son Thomas, the fourth generation to run Lego in the small Jutland town of Billund. “The ambition level is super high — we want to have that impact on every child in the world that we can reach,” says Thomas, who is now chair of Lego as well as Kirkbi, the family investment vehicle that controls the toymaker, in a rare interview. The challenges facing Lego appear formidable — the global toy market has long seen little or no growth as children flock to digital devices for play and entertainment; its iconic plastic bricks are proving harder than expected to rid of oil. But the Danish company is in strong shape financially with sales and net profits that are up more than seven-fold since 2006, and with the committed backing of its long-term family shareholder. Lego is no longer a pure toymaker. Its products appear in TV shows, films, apps and theme park rides with storylines pitched at boys, girls and, increasingly, adults. “Lego is less about brick-based construction and more about being a talent agency for mini-figures,” says David Robertson, author of the leading book on the company, Brick by Brick. Its revenues — including the Legoland theme parks, controlled separately by Kirkbi — are almost as high as Mattel’s and Hasbro’s combined. For many inside and outside the company, the most obvious rival is now the far bigger Disney. “We have to look at ourselves as an entertainment brand. Our brand characteristics are much more like Disney, the brand strengths are much more like Disney than any more traditional toy competitor,” says Niels Christiansen, Lego’s chief executive who is no relation of the founding family. Lego celebrated 90 years as a company in 2022, but it only got into plastic bricks in the 1950s having started out in wooden toys. The strength of its system of play is that all of its bricks are compatible with the others regardless of the decade in which they were made. During a tour of its factory, the company produced a recently recovered brick from 1962 which remains usable today. But Lego’s history is not one of uninterrupted success. The company almost collapsed around the turn of the century under Kjeld’s leadership: it lost faith in the brick and started offering products that looked more like Barbie or Action Man, which backfired. In an effort to save the company, an outsider, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, was hired as chief executive, a back-to-basics policy was instigated with the brick at the heart of things, and Lego has barely looked back. Sales in 2006 were about $1.3bn, almost a third of Hasbro’s and a quarter of Mattel’s. Its profits were about the same as Hasbro’s and half Mattel’s, who produce Transformers and Barbie, respectively. Today it is a different story: its revenues last year were $9.1bn compared with $5.4bn at Mattel and $5.9bn at Hasbro. Lego’s net profit of $1.9bn was well above Mattel’s $390mn and Hasbro’s $200mn, both of whom were below their 2006 levels — although Mattel could receive a boost this year from the Barbie film. Profits in the first half of this year dropped by a fifth at Lego (against losses for the other two toymakers), but Christiansen says this was planned. Profitability soared to unsustainable levels during the Covid-19 pandemic, and Lego decided to invest heavily in digital and sustainability. “Imagine: when I started in October of 2017, I would get a question: do you think the brick is still relevant, or is it coming to an end? I’ve not had that question one single time in the last three or four years,” says Lego’s chief executive, under whose watch the company has consistently taken market share. Lego has increased the number of sets it sells dramatically. Once focused around a couple of homegrown product lines such as the police stations in its City range and warriors of Ninjago designed to appeal to young boys, alongside a few select film tie-ins such as Star Wars and Harry Potter, Lego is now much broader. It has several ranges marketed at girls and numerous huge sets for adults from football stadiums and cars to the Titanic and Concorde. DreamZzz, the first range targeted equally at boys and girls, came out this year along with a new TV show. Other products such as the Super Mario range work with their own apps. It has rapidly increased its retail presence. Partially as a consequence of the bankruptcy of Toys R Us in 2017, Lego has expanded its network from 317 stores that year to about 1,000 currently. Christiansen says there is no upper limit as Lego aims to reach children worldwide, with a particular recent push in China, both with stores and a range — Monkie Kid — designed specifically to appeal to local customers. Legoland theme parks are expanding too. Not everything has worked well — Robertson notes that their “phygital” sets, designed to bridge the gap between physical and digital play, have fared badly with expensive flops such as Nexo Knights, Hidden Side, and Vidyo. “They have a tremendous amount of resources to cover those failures. More power to them for investing in risky things that open up new potential areas for growth,” says Robertson, who is also a senior lecturer on innovation at MIT Sloan. “Lego are a great example of how little innovation experiments can become huge growth opportunities.” Backing Christiansen has been a founding family undergoing a transformation of its own. Kjeld, head of the third generation, was the last to hold a management role at Lego, deciding that the family’s future instead lay in being an active owner. Since 2016, he has gradually stepped back from post after post, completing the transition to his son Thomas in May. Throughout, the family has been mindful of avoiding the squabbling that often besets family businesses as they are passed down the generations. The family has worked with the Swiss IMD business school to develop a family constitution and make sure that each generation becomes engaged with Lego. “In my generation we are three people, in the next generation there are seven, and in the next one there will be even more,” says Thomas. “It’s important to create a structure where the family itself doesn’t become a liability. Because we also know that most often it is the families themselves that destroy the companies they own because they can’t get along or disagree on the direction.” He was designated his generation’s “most active owner”, meaning he has taken on the role of chair at Lego, Kirkbi and the charitable Lego Foundation that also owns a quarter of the toymaker. A new fund called K2 was set up with a low amount of capital but a high number of votes, so if there should ever be disagreement in the future, it would vote alongside the most active owner to push change through. Thomas is already thinking about passing on to the next generation, even if they are aged only two to 17. He has set up a Lego School, which aims to inculcate them with the values and challenges of the toymaker as well as the specificities of running a family company: “It’s simply about equipping them and preparing them as well as we can,” he says, adding that “it’s done in a very playful way so they think it’s fun and want to take an active owner role in the future”. That stems from his own “mixed feelings” growing up in Billund where Lego is a big employer. His parents tried to protect him and his siblings from the business, but at times it could be awkward. “Most of the times it was great when things were good. But when things were not so good, it wasn’t fun at all,” Thomas says, referring to the period in 2003 when his father had to make job cuts, including those of his friends’ parents. The first board meeting he attended at the end of 2004 was an eye-opener. Lego was still in crisis, even if its young chief executive Knudstorp was putting in place what would become a successful turnaround. “Everyone apart from my father said, ‘This isn’t going to work, we have to sell.’ He held on to the idea that there must be more to it than this. So there have been bumps,” says Thomas. Christiansen credits the family with staying the course, particularly during the pandemic, whereas many listed companies took short-term decisions to cut investments to shore up profitability. “It’s harder to consistently build a brand like Lego if you’re listed. You saw some major brands during the pandemic, in order to protect the bottom line, overreact on things that actually hurt the brand,” he says. The chief executive stresses that Lego’s board still discusses profitability, but is more willing to stand by big investments, such as its recent decision to triple spending on sustainability. “I don’t want to leave this impression that it’s just easier or nice, it’s probably more that you can stand through the bigger investments a little better. And if you do it that way, the return will also be better,” he adds. For Thomas, sustainability is particularly important for a brand focused on children. It requires 2kg of petroleum to produce 1kg of plastic, and he is keen to move to renewable sources. Finding a new solution to this existential predicament remains a concern. “The raw material that we rely so much on is based on the wrong thing. It’s a big thing to change that,” he adds. “It has been tough because it goes against the logic of a normal business to push very hard on something that has no return for the next year or years.” But Christiansen says Lego will back many partners and initiatives to find greener plastics. “Here is a place where family ownership can help,” he adds. “We may take a bigger load than most companies will early on to get the ball rolling.” There is a new assertiveness about Lego. Previously, its headquarters in Billund were a drab office building. Now it has a bright new campus — replete with start-up-like touches such as a mini golf course on the roof, baristas doling out free coffee, and a hotel for visiting employees — with a giant mini-figure outside. “Kjeld said, ‘Make it even larger,’” says Timothy Ahrensbach, director of workplace and employee experience, of the Lego statue. Lego House, designed by the world-renowned architect Bjarke Ingels, plunges visitors into a world of bricks, where even the food comes served in them. That confidence extends to corporate deals. Legoland theme parks were sold off in 2005 as part of the turnaround, which pared the toymaker back to its core, but are now back under Kirkbi control. Another Lego Movie — the franchise’s four blockbusters collectively made more than $1.1bn worldwide — is “a possibility,” says Christiansen, although he adds that he never wants to “become predictable”. Meanwhile, Thomas’s ambitions for Kirkbi, which also owns stakes in several large Danish blue-chip companies, transcend Lego. The investment vehicle recently bought a digital learning platform in the US, and he is clear that education is a way of reaching children it cannot through the toymaker and its relatively expensive Lego sets. Lego is building new factories in the US and Vietnam — to go alongside its present ones in Denmark, Hungary, Czech Republic, Mexico and China. It is working on a partnership with Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, to develop a Lego experience in the metaverse. And all the while it is expanding its product portfolio. Cerim Manovi, the creative lead for one such new line called DreamZzz, says she worked on the project for four years, testing 50 different ideas with 15,000 children to develop a new homegrown range for Lego. Finally, her team came up with a dream world inhabited by a series of mash-ups such as a crocodile car, a shark ship and a turtle van. Each set has instructions to build the model 80 per cent of the way, and then gives them a choice on how to finish it off. “We call it ‘guided creativity’,” she says, an attempt to head off complaints Lego’s sets no longer encourage imaginative play. Christiansen says that Lego may be experimenting thanks to its newfound financial strength, but that it is doing so in a focused way. “We can do experiments, but I would rather do fewer things and do them right rather than end up with many initiatives, none of them fully fledged. Because we know what works, and then we invest money behind it.” For Thomas, there is much more ground to conquer. He say: “My father always said we are more than a toy company. Everyone has always said: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you are a toy company.’ But I think the potential and the idea are about so much more.” He sees Lego’s competition as “everyone out there who takes time from children”. Robertson, the academic, agrees that Lego — with toys, TV shows, films, and theme parks — is starting to resemble Disney, which had $82.7bn in revenues last year. “Disney is so much bigger than Lego — and that’s a huge opportunity. Lego can pick and choose how they go after that,” he adds. “You start with this small plastic brick company, and now you have movies, theme parks, digital — someday it could be as big as Disney.” ©The Financial Times Limited 2023. All Rights Reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

I helgen anordnades Monaco Yacht Show, där världens värstingbåtar köps och säljs. Det sammanlagda värdet av båtarna här uppgås gå till motsvarande över 45 miljarder kronor, skriver The Washington Post. Men även om man hade kunnat tänka sig att försäljningen av lyxjakter påverkats negativt av en global inflation, klimatkris och krig i Europa, är så inte fallet. Inte heller sanktioner mot ryska oligarker, som traditionellt sett varit stora köpare, har rubbat industrin. Det största problemet för lyxbåtsmarknaden idag är snarare att utbudet inte räcker till för att möta den höga efterfrågan. (Svensk översättning av Omni). Sanctions imposed on Russian oligarchs don’t seem to have hurt the big-flashy-boat industry By William Booth September 30, 2023 MONTE CARLO - Welcome aboard at the Monaco Yacht Show, where the world's superyachts are bought and sold. Warning: If you find the excesses of the 0.01 percent triggering, avert your eyes. The scene here is like a parking lot crammed with water toys that cost a cool collective $4.3 billion. The technical term for the size of these pleasure craft is "enormous." The top class - the megayachts - are now 100 meters in length - that's 328 feet, more than a football field from goal line to goal line. There are dozens of these boats on order. There's also talk of gigayachts to come. Asked what a giga might be, a top broker joked: "That would be a repurposed aircraft carrier." Have one helipad? Sad. Why not have two? Jet Skis? The new must-have toy is a submersible. There are onboard elevators, naturally, to get between the four, five and six decks. Surfaces are clad in lost forests of teak and mahogany with gleaming stainless steel accents. The deckhands are constantly polishing, rubbing, squeegeeing. You might think superyacht sales would be super down, what with global inflation, a real estate bust in China, threats of recession, trench warfare in Europe and - dare we say it here? - a planetary climate crisis. Surprise. You would be wrong. Russian oligarchs have traditionally been big buyers of showy yachts, accounting for an estimated 10 percent of sales. Sanctions and the U.S. Justice Department's Task Force KleptoCapture have taken a bite. A lot of the Russian boats - including the $700 million megayacht Scheherazade, allegedly owned by Vladimir Putin himself - have been seized. But the world is bigger than Russia - and there are more billionaires than ever. "The sanctions didn't affect the industry as much as you might think," said Bob Denison, a top American broker with new offices in Monaco. He said the orders for "new builds" in European shipyards that were canceled because the buyers were placed on sanction lists were quickly snapped up by others who weren't. The problem with the superyacht market today? "There's not enough superyachts," said Jeremy Roche, one of Denison's directors. It costs 600 euros ($635) for a day pass to the Monaco Yacht Show. Many well-heeled lookie-loos have come this week to stroll along the blue-carpeted docks and bump into a champagne tent. And by well-heeled, we mean it. You must take off your shoes to board boats at the show - even if you are the prince of Monaco. So high-end footwear is strewn in front of the gangways, the ubiquitous Gucci loafers jumbled together with sneakers from Dior and Balenciaga that will set you back about $1,000 a pair. The number of real buyers - the whales - is harder to calculate. A sales rep estimated there might be one buyer for every 1oo staff - that's exhibitors, brokers, deckhands, hostesses, marketers, cleaners, security. We got an invite from a friendly publicist to take a tour of Phoenix 2, built by Lürssen shipyard in northern Germany. She's 90 meters, or 295 feet, with room for 14 guests in seven cabins, attended by a crew of 28 - and on sale for $132 million. The boat was designed for the "richest man in Poland," the late Jan Kulczyk, who wanted the interior to resemble an art deco Manhattan penthouse. There's an Empire State Building vibe, with a lot of black and white - plus a bourbon bar, lap pool, steam sauna, screening room, gym, wine cave, Steinway piano and duplex owners' cabin. Henry Smith, a partner at Cecil Wright brokerage, was showing the boat and happy to discuss the evolving market for superyachts - generally, boats more than 24 meters. Three decades ago, a 40-meter yacht would have been gigantic, he said. Today, those are considered midsize. Of the roughly 1,200 superyachts on order in boatyards, about two dozen are more than 100 meters. "Boats just get bigger and bigger, with prices going up and up," he said. "The future looks bright." The pace of sales is down a bit from the records of the pandemic years, when the ultrarich sought out superyachts as safe havens. But Smith said this year is still good. He and his brokerage recently oversaw the sale of superyacht Kismet, originally built for Pakistani American billionaire Shahid Khan, owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars. The boat was on the market for just three months and sold for 149 million euros ($157 million). The buyers keep coming, but they are changing, the brokers say. Traditionally they have been multimillionaires - 99 percent male - who sell their businesses in their mid 60s and want some high-end downtime with family and friends. The trend now is younger, with younger families, who struck it rich, or as Smith called it, experienced "a big liquidity event." He said, "I took on a chap who made several billion very quickly," who wasn't sure exactly what he wanted, except that he really wanted . . . something big. At the boat show, we learned that sometimes it's impossible to accommodate everything you need on your superyacht. Tenders - used to ferry owners and guests from ship to shore - have a low profile and can be stored aboard in what the yachting community calls "the garage." Robert Oakley of Falcon Tenders will sell you Miss Wonderly for $2.19 million. It's powered by a hybrid diesel-electric engine, which gives you one hour on electric in port. "Think limousine," he said. But where do you put the sub? Ian Sheard, the engineering director of Seamagine, maker of private submarines, explained it to us. "You got the big white boat, the superyacht, right?" Sheard said. "Then you need the toy hauler." Say again? "The 'shadow ship' that follows the superyacht that has all the stuff you can't fit on the superyacht." His submarines cost $4 million to $7 million and can carry two to seven passengers, with over 12,000 drama-free dives so far. On our tours of superyachts, the guides often spoke of the boats' "understated glamour." But the glamour seemed bluntly stated, which was kind of the point? Some interiors had a look and feel of a neutral-color Four Seasons. Others brought to mind a Vegas suite for a high-roller. Aboard the $110-million Kensho, the publicist said that the owner (Udo Müller, chief executive of Ströer Media), wanted "a villa at sea." She described it as "more Zen, more calm." The kind of calm that three onboard bars might provide. An older, smaller superyacht can be had for as little as $10 million - the price of an upscale home in Los Angeles or London. But if you are not ready to buy, many of the boats are used by their owners for only a few weeks in the high season and are otherwise available for charter. To rent the Phoenix 2 costs a base price of $1.22 million a week. That doesn't include fuel, food, drink, taxes, mooring and dock fees or tips - so call it $1.6 million. We had to ask a couple of times about the bill and were told to keep adding zeros. It's the fuel that gets you. A 50-meter yacht making a fast run between Monaco and St. Tropez might burn through $35,000 of diesel. And even if you don't go anywhere, a mooring ball or a slip at a primo port can cost thousands of dollars a night. There was some talk at the Monaco Yacht Show about sustainability - about new green fuels, more gentle anchoring - but it was a sideshow. Smith, the super broker, put it this way. "Green yachting is mostly a fallacy," he said, adding, "no illusion, these things pollute." Though you can mitigate the damage a bit. He suggested anyone chartering a superyacht for a week "go out and plant a lot of trees." © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.