Do we like IKEA?
Flat-pack furniture and home goods retailer; brand owned by Inter IKEA (Netherlands), stores run mostly by Ingka Group.
Our score: 6 out of 10. A mostly decent, well-run retailer with real recycling and renewable progress. Forest-sourcing criticism, privacy fines and a murky tax structure keep us short of fully backing it.
IKEA is really two businesses. Inter IKEA owns the brand and franchises it. Ingka Group is the biggest franchisee, running about 375 stores in 30 countries. Ingka pays a 3% royalty to Inter IKEA. Inter IKEA is owned through a Liechtenstein foundation. That odd structure is behind much of the tax criticism.
Leadership changed recently. Spaniard Juvencio Maeztu became Ingka's first non-Swedish CEO in November 2025. He took over from Jesper Brodin, who had run it for eight years. Maeztu started as a store manager in Madrid in 2001, and says he wants IKEA to grow and reach millions more people.
The green story is real but patchy. Ingka says it scaled Buyback by 39%, reached 60% zero-emission home deliveries and sources 95% renewable electricity. It has also launched second-hand marketplaces in several countries. Those figures come from IKEA itself, so we'd want outside checks before taking them at face value.
Wood is the big worry. Greenpeace has accused IKEA of failing to protect biodiverse European forests. An earlier Greenpeace probe linked IKEA suppliers in Romania to old-growth logging, and IKEA didn't dispute the information. IKEA says 96.5% of its wood and paper is FSC-certified or recycled.
There's a privacy record too. A French court fined IKEA France €1m over a staff-spying scheme, and its former CEO got a suspended sentence. Austria's court upheld a €1.5m fine over cameras at checkouts. Add the tax questions and the score lands at a middling 6 out of 10.