IKEA to hire 10,000 workers a year

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Furniture maker IKEA plans to hire tens of thousands of new workers as the company continues to expand with dozens of new stores opening around the world, the company's chief executive said in an interview published Monday.

"We have to hire at least around 10,000 people a year to meet our ambition of continued growth," Anders Dahlvig, CEO of the IKEA Group, was quoted as saying in Swedish financial daily Dagens Industri.

There are more than 230 IKEA stores in 33 countries, and sales have more than tripled in the last decade, to 17.3 billion euros ($22.1 billion) in the full-year ending Aug. 31.

The company plans to open 24 new stores in the next 12 months in countries including Germany, the United States and Sweden. IKEA's 30th U.S. store — and first in Utah — is scheduled to open on a 22.5-acre parcel north and west of I-15 and Bangerter Highway in Draper in spring 2007.

After a successful opening in Tokyo this year, IKEA is now setting its sights on India, although there are no concrete plans for store openings there yet, Dahlvig said.

"We are clearly interested after India recently started opening up for foreign ownership," he told Dagens Industri. "We are in a stage of analysis and aim at making a decision during the fall."

IKEA spokeswoman Charlotte Lindgren confirmed Dahlvig was correctly quoted.

The company was founded by Swedish entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad in his home village in southern Sweden in 1943. IKEA is still privately held, which Dahlvig said "has contributed a lot to our success because we can act with a more long-term view than many listed companies."

"For example," he said, "it would have been difficult to get stock market acceptance of our efforts in Russia and China. They are not very profitable now but can generate big value in the long term."