Immigrants caught crossing border think they can stay in U... Immigrants caught crossing border think they can stay in U...The world’s most profitable toy company says its Asian growth ambitions would be perfectly intact even if China grows at about half its current pace.Lego A/S Chief Executive Officer Joergen Vig Knudstorp says the benefits of having China continue its transformation into a consumer-based economy with a strong middle class far outweigh any desire to see growth rates of 7-8 percent.“Even with 3-4 percent growth in China, there would be plenty of growth opportunities for us there, especially as the economy is shifting from being driven by industry to being driven by private spending,” Knudstorp told Bloomberg. Lego on Tuesday reported record sales and profit for 2015. Revenue grew about 40 percent in China, which is roughly twice the company’s global average.“Looking over the next 10 years, we see a lot of potential” in China, the CEO said. ‘We’re currently mostly present in the most advanced parts of China, the big cities, where the economy to some extent resembles Denmark.
We expect to expand out of those areas and to go deeper in to China.”China’s factory gauge on Tuesday extended its stretch of deteriorating conditions to a record of seven months as the world’s second-biggest economy struggles with its output. The central bank late on Monday stepped up efforts to cushion demand amid plunging stock prices and a weakening currency, freeing up the amount of cash banks can lend.“We don’t see any effect from the much debated slowdown in the world economy,” Knudstorp said.Lego has roughly doubled both its global revenue and its net income over the past four years. The company in November started producing toys at its first Chinese factory in Jiaxing, on the east coast. “Previously we have seen a strong correlation between Lego’s performance and global growth rates. But in the recent 5 to 10 years, there’s only very little correlation.”Win McNamee / Getty The State of Trump's State Department Anxiety and listless days as a foreign-policy bureaucracy confronts the possibility of radical change
The flags in the lobby of the State Department stood bathed in sunlight and silence on a recent afternoon. “It’s normally so busy here,” marveled a State Department staffer as we stood watching the emptiness. “People are usually coming in for meetings, there’s lots of people, and now it’s so quiet.” The action at Foggy Bottom has instead moved to the State Department cafeteria where, in the absence of work, people linger over countless coffees with colleagues. (“The cafeteria is so crowded all day,” a mid-level State Department officer said, adding that it was a very unusual sight. “No one’s doing anything.”) As the staffer and I walked among the tables and chairs, people with badges chatted over coffee; one was reading his Kindle. The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids Today’s young children are working more, but they’re learning less. Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.
Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines. Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn. Nicole Xu / Spectrum The Hidden Link Between Autism and Addiction It’s believed that people on the spectrum don’t get hooked on alcohol or other drugs. New evidence suggests they do. Shane Stoner’s addiction began in 2008.
He lost a factory job, his parents divorced, his father died—and then a relative introduced him to heroin. “I felt like heroin gave me confidence,” Stoner says. “I could get out of bed in the morning and do the day. No matter what happened, it made me feel like it was going to be all right.” It erased his constant anxiety. Stoner, now 44, eventually entered detox in 2013 after he was arrested for stealing copper from an abandoned house. It was obvious at that point that he was addicted to heroin. But it would take several more years for him to get the diagnosis that truly helped him understand himself: autism. Joshua Roberts / Reuters Why California Is Environmentalists' Trump Card Unique authority granted to the golden state allows it to have a profound impact on emissions regulations. With Scott Pruitt, a close ally of the oil and gas industry, now confirmed as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalists are bracing for a broad assault on former President Obama’s green legacy, particularly his efforts to reduce the carbon emissions linked to global climate change.
In most of those fights, the only viable recourse for environmentalists is to contest Pruitt in court. (They can’t expect much help from the Republican Congress.) But on the critical issue of requiring auto manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency, green forces have another line of defense: unique authority that Congress granted to California under the Clean Air Act decades ago. Across the many confrontations looming between President Trump and Democratic-leaning local governments on issues from immigration to health care, the impending struggle between the EPA and California over fuel economy may be the one where Democrats most clearly hold a trump card.With parents fretting about the safety hazards of toy cars and trains and Barbie accessories, the not-made-in-China label could prove to be a boon to these European toy makers, particularly in their domestic markets, where the corner toy store has not yet been elbowed out by retailing giants like Wal-Mart or Toy “R” Us. “A lot of the sales still rely on the expertise of the guy whom I call Fritz,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in New York.
“To the extent that parents are at all concerned about this, Fritz is going to steer them toward Lego and Playmobil.” Even in the United States, analysts say, there could be a modest bounce for toys not made in China, be they European or American, if parents take the time to look at labels during the coming holiday shopping season. The drawback, some worry, is that consumers might spurn toys altogether.“When parents say, ‘My kid wants a cars toy or Thomas the train,’ are they going to look at where it was made?” asked Tim Conder, a toy analyst with A. G. Edwards & Sons. “Or are they just going to say, ‘I’m not going to buy it?’ ”Steering clear of China was not an easy choice for Playmobil or Lego. Other European manufacturers, like Brio of Sweden, which produces wooden toys, have moved the bulk of their production to China. About 80 percent of all toys sold in the United States are made there. For those who remained in Europe, the decision to keep most manufacturing there was driven more by economics than safety concerns, though the difficulty of controlling quality in far-away factories was also a factor.“
We looked at various options,” said Iqbal Padda, executive vice president in charge of the global supply chain at Lego, noting that at the start, it was widely accepted “that it has to be China.” Ms. Schauer said Playmobil, a family-owned company in Zirndorf, Germany, faced intense pressure to move production to China. Most of the industry was moving there, she said, and German banks did not want to lend money to companies to build toy factories at home.What the companies discovered, though, was while China’s unit labor costs were a fraction of those in the West — the equivalent of $1.50 an hour compared with $30 an hour in western Germany — the distance between China and the companies’ biggest markets eroded some of that cost advantage. In addition, Lego and Playmobil need to respond quickly to fickle consumer demand. To ramp up the production of a surprise hit — a Playmobil World Cup soccer player, for example — would be costly in China, where factories are set up to churn out vast volumes of toys with long lead times.
“Toys are not the fashion business, but they are like the fashion business,” Mr. Padda said. “The need to be able to react to what is going on in the market made us choose” Europe. Today, Lego makes 65 to 70 percent of its bricks at a high-technology factory near its headquarters in Billund, Denmark. To save money, the company, which has struggled in recent years, is shifting production to two plants in Hungary run by Flextronics, a Singapore-based electronics manufacturer. A new Flextronics plant will open in Juárez, Mexico, this fall.Less than 3 percent of Lego’s production comes from China, and it has no plans to set up a factory there. Ravensburger said it produces 85 percent of its toys in its home factory in Germany and a company-owned plant in the Czech Republic. “In-house production,” it said, “provides the best possible quality control for us.” Playmobil, a third the size of Lego and a tenth that of Mattel, has also resisted outsourcing, except for a few electronic parts, like the flashing light atop its police car, which is made in China.
In addition to a flagship factory near its Bavarian headquarters, it owns two plants in Malta and the Czech Republic.Sales of Playmobil toys are growing at a double-digit rate, Ms. Schauer said. In a twist, it plans to export its European-made toys to Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing next year.Still, Playmobil and its European rivals are not about to gloat over Mattel’s misfortune.“We don’t want to throw stones, in case we’re sitting in a glass house,” said Ms. Schauer, whose company last had a recall in the United States in 1982, involving toys made by an American contractor.Playmobil’s medieval knights and Roman warriors are coated with shiny paint — brilliant reds, jaunty yellows and such — which Ms. Schauer said contained lead, albeit well below levels hazardous to children. To ensure the safety of its coating process, she said, Playmobil kept close watch over its manufacturing process. It is clear that Europeans trust Chinese contractors less than their own employees.
In a statement on Playmobil’s Web site, its founder, Horst Brandstätter, said, “Outstanding quality can only be reached when production is carried out under one’s own eyes, by people who have developed brand awareness over a long time, and learned to produce the highest quality.” As Ms. Schauer put it: “You cannot blindly believe in German manufacturing. But when you are so close to the factory, you can jump in your car and be there in 20 minutes.” Not all Europeans agree that factories need to be nearby. Brio, based in Malmo, Sweden, moved the bulk of its production to China in 2004 after it passed from family ownership to a Swedish investment firm. But the chief executive, Thomas Brautigam, said the company exerted rigorous quality control over its three factories in Guangdong Province.“We checked every single paint jar when this happened, but found no problems,” he said, referring to the Mattel lead recall.Brio, Mr. Brautigam said, adhered to stricter quality standards than the industry norm and chose Chinese partners that abided by those standards, even if it meant forgoing the lowest-cost option.