It is not that Lego hasn't tried to move with the times. Toy store shelves feature dozens of new Lego products that bear little resemblance to the sets of bricks that were a childhood staple for 50 years. Today, there are familiar licences in kit form: Harry Potter, Bob the Builder and Winnie the Pooh. There have been successful home-grown innovations, too - Clikits for girls and programmable bricks called Mindstorms (as popular with adults as kids).

The biggest of the recent hits, and number one Lego product in 2003, is an action figure range called Bionicles, which first appeared in virtual form on the web in December 2000. Today, the epic struggle between Toa heroes and Makuta villains for control of Mata Nui, their tropical island world, features in comics and books, on the web, in CD-Roms and even movies, as well as in millions of snap-together kits sold in the shops. Bionicle may not have sold as fast as Beyblades or Yu-Gi-Oh, but they seem certain to outlast them. Three years old and still growing, Bionicle accounted for roughly a quarter of Lego's turnover last year. But the product's real value may prove to be in showing a company steeped in its own traditions the way out of troubled waters.