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Wednesday, 24 August 2005 |
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Ingvar Kamprad (born March 30, 1926) is an industrialist from Sweden.
He founded IKEA, the home furnishing retail chain, in 1943.
Ingvar began to develop a business as a young boy. He started by
selling matches to neighbors from his bicycle. He found that he could
buy matches in bulk very cheaply from Stockholm and sell them
individually at a very low price but still make a good profit. From
matches, he expanded to selling fish, Christmas tree decorations, seeds
and later ball-point pens and pencils. When Ingvar was 17, his father
gave him a gift for succeeding in his studies. The gift was used to
establish his own business.
Ingvar has admitted his dyslexia played a large part in the inner
workings of the company. For example, the acronym IKEA is made up of
the initials of his name plus those of Elmtaryd, which is the family
farm where he was born, and the nearby village of Agunnaryd, which is
in the province of Småland. The Swedish sounding names of the furniture
found at IKEA originally served as names chosen by Kamprad because he
had difficulty remembering stock keeping units.
Kamprad has lived outside Lausanne in Switzerland since 1976.
In 1994 it was revealed that Kamprad had attended some pro-Nazi
meetings in his youth. He has since said that this was a part of his
life that he bitterly regrets, calling it the greatest mistake of his
life. Kamprad is also a recovering alcoholic, which he also deeply
regrets.
According to Swedish business weekly Veckans Affärer ([1]), he is the
wealthiest person in the world. However, this assertion is denied by
IKEA, which notes that Kamprad no longer owns the company, which should
therefore not be included in reports of his wealth. Forbes magazine
continues to rank Bill Gates at #1, ranking Kamprad at #6.
As of April 2005, the sliding value of the U.S. dollar reportedly put
Kamprad ahead as the richest person in the world; however, the report
used Veckans Affärer as its source, which is debatable for reasons
already discussed.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 09 May 2007 )
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