Flat-pack accounting

Friday, May 9th, 2008

IKEA’s creative corporate structure and financing might be called flat-pack accounting:

What emerges is an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world’s richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous. The overall set-up of IKEA minimises tax and disclosure, handsomely rewards the founding Kamprad family and makes IKEA immune to a takeover. And if that seems too good to be true, it is: these arrangements are extremely hard to undo. The benefits from all this ingenuity come at the price of a huge constraint on the successors to Ingvar Kamprad, the store’s founder, to do with IKEA as they see fit.

So IKEA is a Dutch non-profit?

The parent for all IKEA companies — the operator of 207 of the 235 worldwide IKEA stores — is Ingka Holding, a private Dutch-registered company. Ingka Holding, in turn, belongs entirely to Stichting Ingka Foundation. This is a Dutch-registered, tax-exempt, non-profit-making legal entity, which was given the shares of Mr Kamprad in 1982. Stichtingen, or foundations, are the most common form of not-for-profit organisation in the Netherlands; tens of thousands of them are registered.

Most Dutch stichtingen are tiny, but if Stichting Ingka Foundation were listed it would be one of the Netherlands’ ten largest companies by market value. Its main asset is the Ingka Holding group, which is conservatively financed and highly profitable: post-tax profits were €1.4 billion ($1.7 billion) — an impressive margin of nearly 11% on sales of €12.8 billion — in the year to August 31st 2004, the latest year for which the group has filed accounts.

Valuing the Inkga Holding group is awkward, because IKEA has no direct competitors that operate globally. Shares in Target, a large, successful chain of stores in the United States that makes a fifth of its sales from home furnishings, are priced at 20 times the store’s latest full-year earnings. Using that price/earnings ratio, the Ingka Holding group is worth €28 billion ($36 billion).

That’s more than the Gates Foundation — which actual does charitable work.

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