| IKEA is a Swedish-origin Dutch (Netherlands)-headquartered multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories, among other goods and home services. Founded in Sweden in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand used by the group is an acronym that consists of the founder's initials, and those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd (his hometown in Småland, southern Sweden).
In 1943, Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA as a mail-order sales business, and began to sell furniture five years later. The first store was opened in Älmhult, Småland, in 1958, under the name Möbel-IKÉA (Möbel means "furniture" in Swedish). The first stores outside Sweden were opened in Norway (1963) and Denmark (1969). The stores spread to other parts of Europe in the 1970s, with the first store outside Scandinavia opening in Switzerland (1973), followed by West Germany (1974).
In 1973, the company's West German executives accidentally opened a store in Konstanz instead of Koblenz[how?]. Later that decade, stores opened in other parts of the world, such as Japan (1974), Australia, Canada (1975), Hong Kong (1975), Singapore and The Netherlands (1978). IKEA further expanded in the 1980s, opening stores in countries such as France and Spain (1981), Belgium (1984), the United States (1985), the United Kingdom (1987), and Italy (1989).
The IKEA website contains about 12,000 products and there were over 2.1 billion visitors to IKEA's websites in the year from September 2015 to August 2016. The group is responsible for approximately 1% of world commercial-product wood consumption, making it one of the largest users of wood in the retail sector.
As of March 2021, there are 378 IKEA stores operating in 30 countries and in fiscal year 2018, €38.8 billion (US$44.6 billion) worth of IKEA goods were sold. All IKEA stores are operated under franchise from Inter IKEA Systems B.V., most of which are operated by IKEA Group, some of them are operated by other independent owners.
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