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international business assignment
International Business Assignment

About IKEA: the company was founded by Ingvar Kamprad in 1943 in southern Sweden. Following the company’s history over six decades, IKEA has grown from a southern Sweden woods producer to a major global furniture retailer operating in 40 countries around the world. (History, 2013) The business idea of IKEA is to offer a wide variety of well-designed products at low prices so that as many people as possible can afford themselves to buy the products. (Business-Idea, 2013) IKEA’s founder, Ingvar Kamprad sought for an ownership structure that provides independence, long-term approach and continuity and for that reason, IKEA has been owned by a Dutch foundation—Stichting INGKA Foundation. The purpose of this structure is to hold shares and reinvest them in the IKEA group. (IKEA GROUP, 2013) IKEA operates through the whole value chain from production to retail, and tries to be sustainable in every operational procedure. (Sustainability, 12) IKEA’s product range consists of approximately 9500 products, it has 139000 co-workers in total, and has 298 stores in 26 countries in August 31, 2012. The total sales of 2012 are 27 billion and they increased by 9.5% in comparison with 2011. (IKEA GROUP, 2013)
Question 1
a)
Although the head-quarter is located in the Netherlands, we decided to discuss the global connectedness of Sweden, because the company was founded there. According to Professor Ghemawat, Sweden ranks 8 out of 140 countries on the DHL global connectedness index 2012 as well as 13 out of 140 and 11 out of 140 for Depth score and Breadth score respectively. Sweden is highly connected with the world by showing a high rank in both depth and breadth. However, due to the financial crisis in 2007-2008, both the size of the countries’ international flows relative to the domestic economies and the international connection narrowly focused to local region. (Altman, 2012)
Hofstede distinguishes five cultural


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