Swedish furniture giant IKEA announced that it would be making around 10,000 of its remaining Russian staff redundant on Thursday, despite posting a 6% rise in full-year sales in what it described as a “challenging” year due to inflation and scaling back in Russia.
The 2022 fiscal year “was a challenging year for the world, of course with all the things going on around us with pandemics but also very steep increasing inflation,” Dutch holding company Inter IKEA’s CEO Jon Abrahamsson Ring told AFP.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, IKEA closed its 17 outlets in Russia and halted production in the country, where it was one of the largest Western employers before the war with 15,000 employees.
According to Abrahamsson Ring, a “substantial reduction” of employees had already been carried out.
Jesper Brodin, the CEO of Ingka, a holding company that manages most of IKEA’s stores, told AFP that they “had to say goodbye” to around 10,000 staff out of the 12,000 retail employees in IKEA’s Russian stores.
Before the war, the Russian market represented about 4-5% of the group’s sales.
