History of IKEA

An entrepreneur from Småland, Ingvar Kamprad is the founder of Swedish furniture retailer Ikea, a company focused on low cost but serviceable items.

IKEA is a large multinational corporation that sells house wares and furniture. The company operates about 349 stores in 43 countries with sales of about €28.5 billion in 2013 to 500 million customers.

The name is derived from the first letters of four words: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. Elmtaryd is the name of the farm in which Ingvar Kamprad was raise and Agunnaryd is the name of the village in which the farm was located.

In Småland, although the soil is thin and poor the people have a reputation for working hard, living frugally and making the most out of limited resource.

So when Ingvar started his furniture business in the late 1940s, he applied the lessons he learned in Småland to the home furnishings market. In 1945, two years after starting IKEA, Ingvar began advertising his business in local papers and using milk trucks to help deliver his goods.

The trucks could not only deliver to homes, but also the local train station.

The price war going on between mail-order furniture companies ate away at profit margins. With the pressure, Ingvar decided to open a furniture showroom in Almhult in 1953 to give customers the ability to see and experience furniture prior to ordering.

In 1952, the first IKEA catalogue entirely devoted to furniture was issued. By 1953, one of Ingvar’s associates, Gillis Lundgren, had an idea of distributing furniture in kit form, in flat boxes, which permitted a large decrease in shipping costs.

In 1965 IKEA opened a big new store in Stockholm and on the first day the sales went crazy. So the store manger opened up the warehouse and allowed customers to come in and find their own item, and the rest is history.

In 1973, the first store outside Scandinavia was opened outside Zurich, Switzerland.  Its success paved the way for a rapid expansion in Germany, which is the largest IKEA market today.
History of IKEA

Business history of Volvo

In 1927, Volvo completed its first automobile, essentially hand –built on an island near Gothenburg. Volvo was founded in August 1926 as a spin off from the Swedish company SKF.

Initially the company was founded in 1915 for the manufacture and marketing of bearings for the automotive industry.

Volvo gradually emerged as a quality produce of durable, affordable but non fancy cars that could be sold in export markets at reasonable prices, at the time because of low Swedish wages.

Volvo managed to become internationally competitive despite its small scale of operations.

During the 1960s, Volvo’s production was far smaller than that regarded by industrial economists internationally as the viable minimum and even the Swedish Treasury refused to support financially Volvo’s attempt to launch its cars in the US market.

By the early 1970s the US Volvo’s largest market. By the mid to late 1990s Volvo had begun to introduce a series of new products that would literally change its image: the S80 luxury sedan, the C70 coupe and convertible, the V70 T5 turbocharged high performance sports-wagon, the S&V40 (new smaller Volvos) and the SUV-like Cross Country all-wheel-drive wagon.

In 1999, Volvo has been acquired by Ford, before to be sold to Chinese Geely in 2010.
Business history of Volvo