IKEA making it one of the largest users of wood in the retail sector. Most of IKEA's stores and factories were previously owned by INGKA, a holding company controlled by the Stichting INGKA Foundation, one of the 40 wealthiest foundations in the world. Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in 1943 as a mostly mail-order sales business. It began to sell furniture five years later. The first Möbel-IKÉA store was opened in Älmhult, Småland, in 1958 (Möbel means "furniture" in Swedish). The first stores outside Sweden were opened in Norway (1963) and Denmark (1969). The stores spread to other parts of Europe in
Ingvar Wedervang Ingvar Wedervang Ingvar Brynhjulf Wedervang (21 July 1891 – 4 December 1961) was a Norwegian economist and statistician. He graduated from the University of Oslo with a degree in economics in 1913. During the next nine years, he worked first as a government statistician with Statistics Norway, then for the private company Treschow-Fritzøe, and again for a government agency. In 1922 he moved to Munich and continued his studies. He returned to Statistics Norway in 1923 and received his doctorate in 1925 with a dissertation on the sex proportion at birth and infant mortality. Wedervang became lecturer at the University