TLG sentenced by French Competition Council

[xwingyoda]

LEGO Group sentenced fine by French Competition Council

Here is the article on extenso taken from TLC's website

On Thursday, December 20, LEGO France SAS was sentenced a fine of

[Lt. Veers]

That's terrible!

Psst! How much is 1.6 million euros in US dollars?

Edited December 25, 2007 by Lt. Veers

[natelite]

That's terrible!

Psst! How much is 1.6 million euros in US dollars?

about 2.2m :-P give or take a couple of thousands.

[Quarryman]

..you can always trust the French to ruin the fun.. :-| If they broke the competition laws it must have been by having too low prices, which seems like something of a paradox considering our usual complaints about TLG's prices ;-)

[Mikael Willberg]

Try Google some time, "1.6 million euros in us dollars" search should help you out.

Lego had quite small fine compared to Carrefour who got 27M euros, Hashbro 5M euros and Maxi Toys 1.8M euros. Then there were some smaller fines. To mention one more, what some people want to know, is that MegaBrands was fined 240000 euros.

Mig

Edited December 25, 2007 by Mikael Willberg

[iamded]

Shocking! X-O :'-(

And by the way, www.xe.com/ucc is a good Universal Currency Converter that I use, and it says 1,600,000.00 euros = 2,302,724.22 US dollars. That's 2,645,598.30 Australian dollars, 1,164,520.87 pounds, and 3,010,685.04 New Zealand dollars. X-O

~Peace

[MicVash]

Shocking! X-O :'-(

And by the way, www.xe.com/ucc is a good Universal Currency Converter that I use, and it says 1,600,000.00 euros = 2,302,724.22 US dollars. That's 2,645,598.30 Australian dollars, 1,164,520.87 pounds, and 3,010,685.04 New Zealand dollars. X-O

~Peace

Uh Dang!!! Better bring out the ol change bucket for this one!

[Zuloon]

What exactly is the law? Can anyone provide a link / a quote from their government's lawbook... thing?

[Mister Phes]

And by the way, www.xe.com/ucc is a good Universal Currency Converter that I use, and it says 1,600,000.00 euros = 2,302,724.22 US dollars. That's 2,645,598.30 Australian dollars, 1,164,520.87 pounds, and 3,010,685.04 New Zealand dollars. X-O

And 18,000,161.81 Hong Kong Dollars X-D

[Zuloon]

And 18,000,161.81 Hong Kong Dollars X-D

Lol check Zimbabwe

[adik_sa_lego]

that's around 95 Million Philippine Pesos.

i hope they don't try to recuperate that loss through us consumers :(

[alex54]

If they broke the competition laws it must have been by having too low prices

I don't think so!

On the contrary, they can put hight prices!

I heard about this story at the tv news. They said that TLC has fixed the prices of their products, and if a retailer didn't follow them, they won't allow them to sell their products. So why do I always see LEGO in my supermarket with the smaller prices? I have gone to other supermarkets from the same group, and the prices were more expensive... Dunno, maybe a local exeption, a very good exeption!

Anyway, since 2005, the prices were the same, there are no changes.

[WhiteHexagon]

Price fixing happens with many products from what I've heard/experienced. 'Here's our suggested price if you'd like to be allowed to sell our product'. Video games are the same, if not worse. You can go to 10 different stores and all the prices are within 10 silver studs of each other.

LEGO is pretty much the same deal. Only occasionally when a store is having a sale will the prices vary. Toys R Us seem about the best chance of that (at least while I was in Germany the last few years).

Does anyone know the store markups on LEGO? I bet it's close to 40% and yet the price won't vary more than 1% between shops.

Sadly it's the customers that'll end up paying more when companies get punished for this practice.

[Sir Norman Ray]

And people wonder why we British have a natural hatred towards the French. Nah, its not that we've made war against them more times in the last thousand years then Americans eat at McDonalds (woooo! Stereotyping!) nor is that they act like idiots to the world. No, it's because they ruin our fun.

We've been saying it for years, but who listens to us?

Nah, I'm kidding. The fee is tuppence next to the other companies. Besides, what France needs to go against is Games Workshop. THATS OVERPRICED.

[Siegfried]

Does anyone know the store markups on LEGO? I bet it's close to 40% and yet the price won't vary more than 1% between shops.

I know that for 7897 (RC Passenger Train) it was 38%. Very good guess! :-D