Word: ikea
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Some critics of Ikea say that your furniture is easy to break, hard to assemble, and heavy to transport. What's your response to that? The quality is improving. Assembly may be difficult for some people, but we're trying to make it as easy as possible. Our philosophy is that people have more time than money. If you have to trade off between paying more or having someone else do the assembly, many people would make that trade...
...what about the idea that Ikea contributes to a culture of over-consumption? Any retailer wants people to buy more. But we're not trying to build products people should throw away in a few years to buy another one. We use raw material very efficiently. We're far more advanced than other furniture retailers at using less material in our products. I would foresee that in the not-too-far future solid wood products won't exist in our product categories. Resources are limited, so we use techniques where the wood is in the frame, but basically empty inside...
What are your goals for Ikea over the next five to ten years? We will probably increase our presence in developing countries. For these past 10 years our focus has been on existing markets. We've entered only two new markets in 10 years time: Portugal and Japan. That's very little compared to our earlier history. That will change quite a lot over the next 10 years. We'll see seven or eight new markets being opened up in that time frame, 90% in developing countries. I hope India will be on the map, and on this continent maybe...
...else is Ikea's strategy changing? We decided to reduce the pace of our expansion from 25 stores a year down to 15. We realized that expansion had gone a little too fast, and we needed to slow down for a while, for two or three years. And we are experimenting with bigger formats. We are now putting up our stores next to shopping centers, which we want to build ourselves...
...have a replacement candidate in mind to be the next Ikea CEO? No, I don't. We don't have a system like GE had, where they pinpointed three candidates. We should have two or three candidates, but we don't. I could have done a better job on it. I think about it all the time, and it's part of my responsibility. I still have work to do on that...