Ingvar Kamprad

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Ingvar Kamprad (2004) at Växjo University

Ingvar Feodor Kamprad ( listen ? / I ; born March 30, 1926 in Pjätteryd, Älmhult ; †  January 27, 2018 in Liatorp, Älmhult) was a Swedish entrepreneur and the founder of the furniture company IKEA . According to Forbes magazine , he was one of the richest people in the world. Audio file / audio sample

Life

Ingvar Kamprad's mother was Swedish, his father was born in Germany and came to Sweden with his parents when he was one year old. Kamprad's paternal grandfather, Achim Erdmann Kamprad, came from the Altenburger Land in Thuringia . They went to Sweden in 1896.

Even as a child, Kamprad traded in many different goods, including matches and ballpoint pens.

In 1943, at the age of 17, he founded the IKEA company. The acronym IKEA consists of the initials of his name, the first letter of the name of his parents' farm Elmtaryd and the first letter of his home village Agunnaryd in Ljungby parish , where he grew up.

In 1947 he added furniture to his range, and in that year he also published his first catalog. From 1952 he concentrated entirely on the furniture mail order business . The first IKEA furniture store was opened in Älmhult (southern Sweden) in 1958, and he opened his first foreign furniture store in Oslo ( Norway ) in 1963 . The first store outside Scandinavia was opened in 1973 in Spreitenbach in Switzerland , the first in Germany in 1974 in Eching near Munich , the first in Austria in the Shopping City Süd near Vienna in 1977. Today there are 340 furniture stores in 28 countries worldwide (as of January 2017).

In 1973 Kamprad left Sweden and moved first to Denmark , then to Switzerland, where he lived in Epalinges . After his wife's death in 2011, and after living in Switzerland for over forty years, Kamprad decided to return to Sweden. From 2013 he lived near Älmhult.

Kamprad astonished the public with the confession that he had a pronounced weakness in reading and writing ( dyslexia ) and was leading an eternal fight against the "demon alcohol".

Kamprad said of himself that, like many Smålanders , he was a curmudgeon and a bargain hunter. He has been repeatedly voted Sweden's most popular manager . Ingvar Kamprad died in 2018 on his property in Liatorp in the parish of Älmhult he was born in.

capital

From Forbes his assets were 23 billion 2010 US dollars estimated. So he was ranked 11th on the list of the richest people in the world. According to the journal Bilanz , which estimated his wealth at 35 to 36 billion Swiss francs (as of 2009), he was the richest person living in Switzerland . This booth is held by the family until today (2018). The assets increased to 50 to 51 billion Swiss francs. In doing so, he benefited from flat-rate taxation . The flat taxes paid by Kamprad in Epalinges amounted to 45,000 Swiss francs. In 2011 Kamprad lost its top position and dropped out of the TOP 100 of the Forbes list. His net worth was estimated at $ 6 billion.

family

Kamprad was married twice, most recently to Margaretha until her death in December 2011. This marriage resulted in three children: Peter Arras Feodor (* 1964), Hans Jonas Ingvar (* 1966) and Niclas Achim Mathias (* 1969). From his first marriage with Kerstin Wadling from 1950 to 1960, he has the adopted daughter Annika Kihlblom.

Relationship to National Socialism

In 1994, Swedish mass media reported on Ingvar Kamprad's relationship with National Socialist groups. The Swedish tabloid Expressen revealed that he had financially supported the right-wing organization Nysvenska Rörelsen from Per Engdahl , a friend and well-known National Socialist, until 1945. From 1942 Kamprad was also an active member of this organization. Kamprad's grandmother, who came from Bohemia , was a supporter of the National Socialists. It was through them, according to Kamprad, that he was provided with Nazi reading. As a result of these media reports, public calls for an IKEA boycott were made . Kamprad apologized in 1994 in a handwritten open letter with several pages to his employees and customers and described the payments today as "the greatest stupidity of my life". In 2008 he added in a television interview that he “sympathized more with Mussolini than with the other guy”. He was attracted by the “cooperative idea”.

At the end of August 2011, it became known that he had been a functionary of the fascist party Svensk Socialistisk Samling (SSS), which existed until 1945 . The Swedish television journalist and author Elisabeth Åsbrink wrote in her book Och i Wienerwald står traden kvar (And the trees are still standing in the Vienna Woods) that Kamprad had recruited members for the SSS and, according to her own statement, spent a lot of time and energy on this activity. As early as 1943, the then 17-year-old was targeted by the secret police, who opened a file on him that Åsbrink cited. The author further claimed that Kamprad's connections to the SSS network and to the right-wing leader Per Engdahl were very intense even after the war and into the 1950s.

INGKA Foundation

Much of the IKEA fortune is because of the tax benefits of the Stichting INGKA Foundation based in the (INGKA Foundation) Netherlands managed whose supervisory board belonged Kamprad. The value of the foundation was last estimated at 36 billion euros.

In 1983 Kamprad was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lund University and on February 11, 2006 from Växjö University .

The Ikano group of companies with IKANO-Bank, a former subsidiary of IKEA, also belongs to the Kamprad family.

reception

A “musical furniture saga” by Erik Gedeon and Klas Abrahamsson about the life of Kamprad was premiered in 2009 at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg under the title The Miracle of Sweden .

In the novel An Honest Offer by the Norwegian author Frode Grytten , the plan to kidnap Ingvar Kamprad plays a major role. It was published in 2012 by Nagel & Kimche as a German translation of the Norwegian original Saganatt . The novel was filmed in 2014 under the title Her er Harold and was released in German cinemas in June 2016 as Kill Billy .

literature

Movie

Web links

Commons : Ingvar Kamprad  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.bild.de/news/ausland/ingvar-kamprad/das-testament-des-ikea-gruenders-55093570.bild.html
  2. ↑ Ingvar Kamprad är död [Ingvar Kamprad is dead] , Göteborgs-Posten, in Swedish, January 28, 2018.
  3. ↑ Ingvar Kamprad och hans IKEA: En svensk saga in the Google book search Chapter 3
  4. ↑ ikea.com: About the Ikea Group
  5. ↑ Ikea founder Kamprad returns to Sweden. Focus Online, June 26, 2013.
  6. ↑ Ingvar Kamprad flyttar hem till Sverige. In: Dagens Nyheter , June 26, 2013 (Swedish).
  7. ↑ Ikea founder pays taxes in Sweden again. Spiegel Online , accessed March 23, 2016 .
  8. ↑ a b Excused for Nazi activity. , focus.de, March 30, 2006.
  9. ↑ a b Ex-Nazi and drunkard - Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad confesses the dark spots in his picture book career. focus.de, August 24, 1998.
  10. ↑ a b Rich, poor man - Ikea founder Kamprad turns 80 - Nazi allegations, alcohol problems and a reading disorder (...) spiegel.de, March 30, 2006.
  11. ↑ Welt.de: The secret of the typical Ikea design (accessed on January 29, 2018)
  12. ↑ Forbes List of the Richest Entrepreneurs in the World (March 2010)
  13. ↑ The balance sheet for the 300 richest people in Switzerland.
  14. ↑ 10 richest Swiss own 203 billion francs. In: watson.ch . November 29, 2018, accessed November 30, 2018 .
  15. ↑ What are fair taxes? . The federal government , November 14, 2014.
  16. ↑ More billionaires than ever on the Forbes list. focus.de.
  17. ↑ blick.ch
  18. ↑ Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of IKEA. Official from the Swedish Institute.
  19. ↑ The richest Swede's dark Nazi past. In: Die Welt vom 25 August 2011 Retrieved on 25 August 2011.
  20. ^ Johnsson, Kamprad och Schmid nya hedersdoktorer . Press release from the University of Växjö. ( Memento of September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (Swedish).
  21. ↑ The Miracle of Sweden. Homepage of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus.
personal data
SURNAME Kamprad, Ingvar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kamprad, Ingvar Feodor (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish entrepreneur, founder of IKEA
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Pjätteryd, Älmhult (municipality) , Sweden
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 2018
Place of death Liatorp, Älmhult (municipality) , Sweden