IKEA is the world’s largest retailer of furniture with around 300 stores in 26 countries and around 130,000 employees, of which 96,000 in retail, and 20,000 in manufacturing in the Swedwood and Swedspan companies.
IKEA has just over 1,000 suppliers in 55 countries which work to supply company’s range of around 9,500 different products. It also has around 250 transport providers, 39 catalogue suppliers and around 90 food suppliers. Supplies of materials are sourced from Europe (62%), Asia (34%) and North America (4%). Annually, the IKEA catalogue is printed in around 197 million copies in 29 languages and distributed free of charge and the company claims that its websites attract over 700 million visits.
The IKEA group is privately-owned through a series of charitable and non-profit foundations, chiefly through the INGKA Stichting, based in the Netherlands. Recent reports have uncovered a further layer of ownership, through the Lichtenstein-based Interogo Foundation. Since it operates as a private company, it is not required to publish annual results and reports to shareholders. However it did report in 2010, for the first time, of sales of EUR 23.1 billion, divided as follows: Europe 79%; North America 15%; Asia 6%.
Since 1998, the BWI has had an international framework agreement which covers the IKEA suppliers of wood-based products. Partially as a result of this cooperation, IKEA developed its own internal code for suppliers which includes the respect of ILO Core Labour Standards. Cooperation has grown over a number of years in a number of areas, particularly on the environment with WWF and on combating child labour with UNICEF.
The company, in its latest sustainability report (2010), highlights a number of areas in which it is seeking to develop a more sustainable business model. It has increased its use of sustainable wood to 23.6%, and has aims to increase this figure in the future. Similarly for cotton, it claims 13.4% of its cotton supplies come from sustainable sources.
The IKEA group company Swedwood has grown in line with IKEA’s expansion in recent years to become arguably the world’s largest single manufacturer of wooden furniture. More recently, the Swedspan group, which produces mainly board products for Swedwood, was spun off from the original Swedwood group.
Swedwood, with its around 15,500 employees in 40 offices and factories in 10 countries with production units in Sweden, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, USA. It also has an office in China where it plans to open a plant in the future. In recent years it has closed down its operations in Germany and Ukraine. Swedspan has around 500 employees and production units in Sweden, France, Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia.
Since Swedwood opened its factory in Danville, USA, in 2008, talks between BWI and IKEA/Swedwood have focused on the observance of trade union rights at the plant, and in particular efforts by the BWI-affiliated IAMAW to organise the workforce. So far these talks have not provided a satisfactory result.
