LEGO’s Largest Factory Will Grow Less Than Its Capacity in Monterrey
- LEGO has spent two decades expanding the same plant in Monterrey, but each new phase required something different from the industrial space it occupies.
LEGO’s largest factory in the world is in Monterrey, and it is still growing. Over the next few years, the company will expand its footprint by about 20%, but expects to increase production capacity by 35%. To do so, it will add 62,000 square meters for operations including packaging and automated storage.
The new expansion is not starting from a static plant. Between the second quarter of 2023 and the same period of 2026, the industrial space occupied by LEGO and tracked by SiiLA increased by about 31%, from 240,000 to 315,000 square meters. The nearly 75,000 additional square meters ranked the company 30th for space added among 4,466 companies present in both periods and, within the Consumer Products sector to which it belongs, represented the largest expansion among 97 comparable companies.
The current scale is difficult to recognize in the plant where LEGO began production in Monterrey in 2008. At the time, it operated one building and five packaging lines and employed 178 people. By 2022, the complex had grown to six buildings, 100 packaging lines and 769 molding machines, while its workforce had reached about 5,000.
That growth also changed the type of space the operation required. Processing, molding, and automated storage areas were added to production and packaging space, functions that have reappeared in successive expansions of the complex.
By 2025, that infrastructure could produce about 200 million pieces a day using more than 1,200 injection-molding machines. If that pace were sustained for a year, it would amount to about 73 billion elements, nearly 1.8 times the 41.6 billion bricks LEGO estimates it would need to recreate the Eiffel Tower at full scale.
How LEGO Has Expanded Its Monterrey Factory
Increasing capacity has not depended solely on expanding the factory. LEGO has developed the complex using a modular system that it also employs at its other plants, allowing it to grow by adding spaces dedicated to different stages of production. That means the square meters added do not necessarily serve the same function or provide the same capacity. A 7,412-square-meter processing building added in 2021, for example, can decorate up to 2.1 billion elements a year, while a 26,350-square-meter automated warehouse from 2019 is designed to hold 676,800 boxes and 69,300 pallets.
Adding those spaces successively also requires somewhere to put them. LEGO’s Monterrey plant occupies an 87-hectare site, of which the industrial space tracked by SiiLA represents about 36%. The remainder cannot be considered a reserve for new construction because it includes roads, yards, parking, services, and other areas needed for operations, but room for continued growth is particularly relevant at a plant that, since beginning production in 2008, has announced an expansion roughly every two and a half years.
For a company that has spent 18 years accommodating its growth within a finite site, available land is not the only way it can expand. The current expansion will also grow upward with the second automated high-bay warehouse LEGO plans to add to its Monterrey plant by 2029.
This highlights a relationship that is not always proportional in the industrial market. An increase in manufacturing capacity does not necessarily generate equivalent demand for new space because some growth can come from changes in the characteristics and use of existing properties or from the expansions being added.
In LEGO’s case, as it prepares to add about 1,300 jobs to the 7,300 it already had, that does not mean its real estate expansion will stop. Instead, it means that, in some cases, a single company’s real estate needs can change without the company changing locations, as its growth requires something different from the property it occupies.
Want to know how companies’ space needs have changed in Mexico’s industrial market? Visit SiiLA Market Analytics or email us at contacto@siila.com.mx.
