The richest eccentric in the world

By CAHAL MILMO

He describes his only luxury in life, a small Provencal vineyard, as a "very expensive hobby". His car is an 11-year-old Volvo, he trawls the internet for flight bargains and always travels in the economy cabin.

For a man of average wealth, such behaviour would be considered prudent. But according to financial experts in his native Sweden, the figure behind such careful spending habits now also happens to be the richest individual on the planet.

Ingvar Kamprad, who as founder of Ikea is responsible for creating a global epidemic of head-scratching at self-assembly wardrobe instructions, has overtaken Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, as the wealthiest human being by amassing a personal fortune of US$53 billion ($81.8 billion).

The figure, which is hotly contested by Ikea, highlights the remarkable success of the publicity-shy entrepreneur, who has turned flat-pack book shelves and public holiday queues into a vastly successful business, despite a private battle with alcoholism and damaging publicity arising from a youthful flirtation with Nazism.

Research commissioned by Swedish business magazine Veckans Affarer claims that previous assessments of Kamprad's wealth, which put his fortune at a mere US$13 billion, have been gross under-estimates.

The new assessment alleges that the furniture magnate, who no longer has a role in the daily running of Ikea, is still the ultimate owner of the private company, which is split into multiple subsidiaries and is headed by a charitable foundation based in the Netherlands.

As a result, the famously parsimonious Kamprad is propelled from the relative obscurity of 13th place on the Forbes magazine rich list, regarded as the gold standard for ranking vast wealth, to holder of the biggest pile of individual lucre in the world.

The estimate puts Kamprad, 77, ahead of Gates, who has a cash mountain of US$46.6 billion, and the American investment guru Warren Buffet, with US$42.9 billion.

Bo Petterssen, the financial analyst and journalist who researched Kamprad's wealth for Veckans Affarer, said: "Because it is a private company, it has been notoriously difficult to find out the true value of Ikea and also Mr Kamprad's wealth.

"But we have looked at private figures from Dutch archives which allow us to assess the profits and what Ikea would be worth if it was floated on the stock market.

"Because we argue that Mr Kamprad is still in control of virtually 100 per cent of the group, we can estimate his personal fortune. It is a large one."

Since Kamprad founded Ikea at the age of 17 it has made his non-conformism a trademark, whether by under-cutting its early competitors by collecting stock from suppliers under cover of darkness or recently by urging its dowdy British customers to "Chuck out the chintz" in an advertising campaign.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Ikea was less than happy to accept the elevation of Kamprad from the status of an also-ran billionaire to a latter-day Croesus.

The company insisted that the decision by Kamprad in 1982 to put Ikea under the control of the Stichting INGKA Foundation, a charitable trust that supports various architecture and design institutions, meant his personal wealth was not connected to Ikea.

Marianne Barner, the company's spokeswoman, said a figure based on a stock market valuation of Ikea was therefore seriously misleading.

"This is completely wrong," she said. "It's a mistake that is made all the time. Estimating the value of the company, including all the stores, and saying it's all Ingvar's, that is totally wrong. Ingvar Kamprad does not own Ikea."

But the company declined to offer an alternative figure for Kamprad's personal wealth or a breakdown of the destination of the profits from its annual sales, which last year reached US$12.2 billion. Ikea now has 174 of its blue and yellow warehouse stores in 36 countries.

As one London analyst put it: "It is a private company with a very specific structure. It doesn't have to answer to shareholders, so it can pursue a long-term social agenda. But it also means that it doesn't have to discuss how much its founder is really worth."

Whatever the true extent of Kamprad's billions, there can be little doubt of the business genius and eccentricity that made them possible.

Brought up on a farm in southern Sweden, he had to be constantly coerced into milking the family dairy herd, to the despair of his father.

But by 20, the young Ingvar had expanded his retail company - named from his initials and the first letters of two Swedish towns - into selling furniture and produced a mail-order catalogue that distributed its first flat-pack kits using the local milk van.

When his Swedish stores, first opened in 1953, became too busy for staff to man both the showroom and tills, Kamprad invented the retail system that helped propel Ikea to phenomenal success: the customers were left to pick up their home-furnishing bargain from the warehouse and the "co-workers" took the money.

The subsequent expansion of the group, which also owns Habitat in Britain and has its busiest store worldwide at Brent Park in north London, has survived despite Kamprad's self-confessed early brush with alcoholism while sourcing stock from Poland and the revelation in 1995 that he had attended meetings of a Swedish pro-Nazi party between 1945 and 1948.

"This is part of my life I bitterly regret," he said. "At first I got in touch with a pair of Nazified organisations and perhaps I even became a member, I have forgotten. However, after a couple of meetings in pure Nazi style, I quit."

The entrepreneur, whose first Ikea slogan was "Not for the rich but for the wise", now lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he does not have to pay Swedish taxes and continues to reject the luxuries of life.

As well as eschewing first-class travel and restricting his foreign property portfolio to his French vineyard, he also waits until the afternoon to do his fruit and vegetable shopping at the local market because that is when traders drop their prices.

In one of his rare interviews, he said: "If I start to acquire luxurious things then this will incite others to follow suit. It is important that leaders set an example."

There is also little sign that Kamprad's vast wealth has done him any damage in his native land.

"He is seen as a little eccentric but he is also a hero," Petterssen said. "After all, he is spreading Sweden's colours across the world."

Ikea Furniture retail franchise

* Selling concept: good design, cheap prices

* First Ikea store opened 1958, Almhult, Sweden

* Now more than 190 stores in 30 countries

* Global turnover: €12.37 billion ($22.9 billion)

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