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IKEA: "IT'S A BIG COUNTRY; SOMEONE HAS TO FURNISH IT" IKEA, the world's largest home furnishings retail chain, was founded in Sweden in 1943 as a mail-order company and opened its first showroom ten years later. From its headquarters in Almhult, IKEA has since expanded to worldwide sales of more than $3 billion from 119 outlets in 24 countries (see Table 1). In fact, the second store that IKEA built was in Oslo, Norway. Today, IKEA operates large warehouse showrooms in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. It has smaller stores in Kuwait, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Canary Islands, and Iceland. A store near Budapest opened in 1990. The international expansion of IKEA has progressed in three phases, all of them continuing at the present time: Scandinavian expansion, begun in 1963; West European expansion, begun in 1973; and North American expansion, begun in 1974. Of the individual markets, Germany is the largest, accounting for 27.5 percent of company sales. The phases of expansion are detectable in the worldwide sales shares depicted in Figure 1. "We want to bring the IKEA concept to as many people as possible," IKEA officials have said. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TABLE 1 IKEA's International Expansion Year Outlets Countries 1954 1 1 1964 2 2 1974 10 5 1984 66 17 1988 75 19 1990 95 23 1992 119 24 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE IKEA CONCEPT Ingvar Kamprad, the founder, formulated as IKEA's mission to "offer a wide range of home furnishings of good design and function at prices so low that the majority of people can afford to buy them." The principal target market of IKEA, which is similar across countries and regions in which IKEA has a presence, is composed of people who are young, highly educated, liberal in their cultural values, white-collar workers, and not especially concerned with status symbols.
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