Ikea Furniture is a multi-national furniture and home-accessories company in the Netherlands. The IKEA group designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances, and home accessories.
Ikea Furniture is one of the world’s forefront furniture retailers since 2008 and was founded originally in 1943 in Sweden. The founder, Ingvar Kamprad was at the time a 17-year-old individual who later was listed in Forbes Magazine (2015) as one of the ten richest people in the world.
Ingvar was the owner of a 40 billion+ dollar fortune company with a name that happens to be an acronym. The acronym is a mixture of his initials, Ingvar Kamprad, the name of the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd and the name of his hometown in Småland, southern Sweden, Agunnaryd.
Ikea Furniture brings about modern designs for any kind of appliances and furniture and has the most exquisite yet simple interior design work. Not all these attributes are the end of IKEA’s addition to the world in general. The firm also has the lowest prices on an average of 2-3% because of its attention to cost control, operational details, and continuous product development.
Various Ikea Furniture Establishments
Ikea Furniture is operating in more than 41 countries with up to 301 stores and 30 franchised units. The German franchise is known to be the largest market for the company with 44 stores, then the United States with 37 stores.
Ikea Furniture also has sales of over $24 Billion with $3 billion coming from the US according to reports from 2012. With 533 million visits in its stores even though their products are exclusive to IKEA, the company still reflects its Swedish heritage with modern architectural design.
The company’s corporate structure seems to be quite uptight in a way that indicates it’s going to remain private in a long while. It is controlled by several foundations based in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein. IKEA’s operations, management of the stores, design, and manufacture of furniture are run by the INGKA Holding. Although its designs are made in Sweden, the manufacturing has been recorded to occur in China and other Asian countries.
So far, IKEA has the world’s five largest stores at:
- 552,000 square feet in Stockholm, Sweden
- 494,000 square feet in Shanghai, China
- 470,000 square feet in Shenyang, China
- 457,000 square feet in Tianjin, China
- 450,000 square feet in Berlin, Germany.
As of August 2017, IKEA is said to own and operates 400 stores in 49 countries, has sold €36.4 billion worth of goods by the end of 2016 that was a 7.6 percent increase over 2015. There are 12,000 products listed on the IKEA website and the company is solely responsible for approximately 1% of wood consumption commercial-products.
Till date, Ikea Furniture is one of the largest users of wood in the retail sector on the world’s market scale. A recent acknowledgment of constructing a wind farm has the company’s focus driving towards renewable energy in the future.