Albin Johansson

Albin Johansson, 1920

Karl Albin Abraham Johansson (born February 11, 1886 in Stockholm ; † August 28, 1968 there ) was a Swedish entrepreneur. From 1924 to 1959 he was general manager and chairman of the board of the Swedish cooperative cooperative Förbundet (KF).

Life

Albin Johansson began his professional career at the age of 14 as an apprentice in the military equipment company MEA (Militärekiperingsaktiebolaget). In 1903 he joined the consumer cooperative Tanto in South Stockholm and subsequently made a steep climb within the consumer cooperative movement. In 1907, at the age of only 21, he became head of the auditing department of the Kooperativa Förbundet. After a study trip to Germany in 1913, he persuaded a number of competing cooperatives to join forces to form the large cooperative Konsum Stockholm.

The convinced free trader and opponent of the powerful monopolies and cartels in Sweden established himself early on as an economic troubleshooter and charismatic leader. From the 1920s to the end of the 1950s, he dominated the large-scale purchasing company KF and, with a team of committed employees, built a large corporation with aggressive pricing, whose market-stimulating activity was also recognized by liberals.

Johansson's most famous action was the fight against the international light bulb cartel , which KF challenged in 1930 with the in-house production of Luma lamps. In 1931 KF also started to build its own cash registers (Hugin - based on a patent from the engineer Birger Högfors). Hugin cash registers became KF's first export product. Johnson was very interested in technology, which is why he was chairman of the Swedish Inventors' Association for many years. The autodidact with minimal schooling was also interested in music and theater. In 1956 he received an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Commerce .

In his later years Johansson tried to solve the structural problem of the federalist structured cooperative movement in the sense of a dominance of KF over the warehouse system and logistics, the primary cooperatives would have been reduced to the sales task. However, the aging patriarch did not succeed in implementing this solution, which was rational in itself, but which corresponded to a power-political task of the owners of KF.

literature

• Olof Ruin: Kooperativa förbundet 1899–1929. En organizational study . Rabén & Sjögren Verlag, Stockholm 1960.
• Hugo Kylebäck: Konsumentkooperation i Strukturomvandling 3 parts (Volume 1: 1946–1960; Volume 2, 1960–1985, Volume 3, 1985–1995), Göteborg 1983–1999
• Johann Brazda , Gerhard Rönnebeck and Robert Schediwy (eds.): Pioneer cooperatives using the example of consumer cooperatives in Great Britain, Sweden and Japan . Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1996
• Johann Brazda and Robert Schediwy (Eds.): Consumer Co-operatives in a Changing World . Geneva 1989, especially Volume 1, p. 269 ff.
• Herman and Sven Stolpe: Boken om Albin Johansson . 2 volumes, Stockholm 1969
• Lars Eronn: Kooperativa idéer ochomanniskor , Kristianstad 1983
• Svenskt biografiskt lexikon , Stockholm 1975, page 239