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Billionaire IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, who turned a business he launched as a teenager into one of the world’s best known furniture brands, has died aged 91, the Swedish company said on Sunday.
IKEA’s simple but sturdy designs and self-assembly products are now familiar in homes around the globe and the retailer is aiming to generate 50 billion euros, or 62 billion US dollars, in annual revenues by 2020.
Kamprad started IKEA in 1943 when he was just 17, but his big break came in 1956, when the company pioneered flat-pack furniture.
He got the idea when he watched an employee taking the legs off a table to fit it into a customer’s car and realized that it could be developed to save money on transport, storage and sales space.
The business now has around 400 stores, many of them cavernous warehouses in out-of-town malls, receiving roughly 1 billion people last year.
Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven praised Kamprad as an inspirational figure whose influence had reached far beyond his native land.
“Ingvar Kamprad was a unique entrepreneur who had a big impact on Swedish business and who made home design a possibility for the many not just the few,” national news agency TT quoted Lofven saying.
Born on March 30, 1926, in southern Sweden, Kamprad started off selling matches to neighbors at the age of five and soon diversified his inventory to include seeds, Christmas tree decorations, pencils and ball-point pens.
In recent years, Kamprad had stepped away from the day-to-say running of the empire he created, though he remained an adviser.
His sons – Peter, Jonas and Mathias – still sit on the boards of various IKEA entities, but the family is no longer at the helm.
(REUTERS)
