Ikea has appointed the first non-Swedish chief executive of the most important company in its flat-pack furniture empire.
Juvencio Maeztu, a Spaniard who is deputy chief executive and chief financial officer of Ingka, will take over as boss of the group running nearly all Ikea stores from Jesper Brodin on November 5th.
Mr Brodin has led the world’s largest furniture retailer for the past eight years through a particularly turbulent time, including the death of founder Ingvar Kamprad, a big business transformation including a push into city centres and online sales, and the Covid-19 and supply chain crises.
“I feel butterflies, but also humble, thankful and excited,” said Mr Maeztu, who started as a store manager for Ikea in Spain in 2001 and ran the Wembley store in London and the retailer’s business in India.
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“Ikea is always based on self-renewal – making things every day a bit better. I still see many opportunities to make Ikea more relevant and keep growing all around the world,” he told the Financial Times.
Ikea is moving away from only having big edge-of-town warehouses where customers must collect flat-packs and build furniture themselves by offering services such as delivery and assembly as well as opening city-centre stores in locations including London, Paris and Copenhagen.
Mr Brodin said on Wednesday that Ikea’s transformation was “late due to our own success” but it was now a full “omnichannel” retailer serving customers both in stores and online, as well as using its vast warehouses to fulfil online orders.
Ingka, which operates 88 per cent of all Ikea stores, last year suffered a 5 per cent drop in revenues to €42 billion and a near-halving of net profit to €800 million as it prioritised price cuts after several years of increases because of supply chain issues.
Lars-Johan Jarnheimer, Ingka’s chairman, said Ikea needed to continue addressing its biggest challenge of “further reducing our prices”.
He added: “When there is a CEO change in a listed company, it comes very often with a strategy change. It’s not the case in Ikea where the strategy is already set by Ingvar [Kamprad].”
Mr Maeztu is only the second Ikea chief executive not to have been an assistant to Kamprad, who died in 2018 aged 91 having started the group as a teenager in rural Småland in Sweden.
“I have been dozens of times with Ingvar on the shop floor starting at five in the morning in the loading area and finishing at 10 in the evening with a hot dog. The important thing is that we all carry Ingvar’s spirit, and this I feel very loyal to,” said Mr Maeztu.
Mr Brodin will work for Ikea until February when he will become a senior adviser to its charity and owner, the Ikea Foundation. A keen musician who recently released his debut album, Mr Brodin said he would seek to work with “business and sustainability transformation as long as I can walk and talk”. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
