Every IKEA store on earth pays three percent of its net sales into the same Dutch company. Ingka Group, which operates most of those stores, states the term plainly on its own site: "In return, IKEA franchisees pay Inter IKEA Systems B.V a franchise fee of 3% of their net sales." In the year ended 31 August 2025 that pipe carried 1,320 million euros, down slightly from 1,348 million.
Follow it to the far end and you do not arrive at a family. You arrive at a foundation in Liechtenstein that is legally barred from having a beneficiary. Follow the retail half instead and you arrive at a Dutch foundation in Leiden that says this of itself in Ingka's tax report: "INGKA Foundation does not have any owners. It also does not have any beneficial owners but holds its assets only on its own behalf. This means that nobody is entitled to the assets of INGKA Foundation."
Nobody is entitled to it. What Ingvar Kamprad's descendants inherited is not the money. It is a charter-guaranteed minority of the seats on the bodies that appoint the people who decide.
Two halves, one pipe
IKEA is two groups with different owners, and Ingka says so in a sentence most write-ups skip: "Inter IKEA Group and Ingka Group have the same founder, as well as a common history and heritage, but are two groups of companies with different management and different owners."
The brand half is Inter IKEA Group, which owns the concept, runs the franchise system, designs the range and moves the goods. Its top company is Inter IKEA Holding B.V., corporate seat in Delft, incorporated 30 September 1992, Dutch trade register number 27163852. FY25 revenues were 26,306 million euros, of which 24,860 million was goods sold to franchisees and only 1,320 million was franchise fees, with net income down to 1,496 million from 2,199 million. The retail half is Ingka Group, a franchisee like any other: revenue 41,451 million euros, net income 1,411 million, corporate income tax 689 million, group equity 48,414 million, 166,460 co-workers.
Franchisee is the load-bearing word there. Inter IKEA's FY25 diagram counts thirteen franchisee groups across 63 markets. Ingka runs 31 of them and accounts for around 87 percent of IKEA retail sales, but it pays the same three percent as everyone else, including Ikano Group, the separate company the family has long owned and which operates IKEA in five markets. Worldwide IKEA retail sales came to 44.6 billion euros in FY25, against 45.1 billion in FY24 and 47.6 billion in FY23. Two consecutive years of decline is the figure nobody quotes.
Ingka reinvests 85 percent of its result and pays up 15 percent, roughly 212 million euros to INGKA Foundation for FY25. Inter IKEA declared a 1.4 billion euro dividend and paid 1,800 million in cash during the year. Close to two billion euros moved in twelve months into entities that no person is entitled to, and that addition is my arithmetic rather than a disclosed total.
Who actually owns the brand half
If you have read anything about IKEA written before 2024, it told you the brand belongs to Interogo Foundation in Liechtenstein. That has been wrong since 2023.
Interogo demerged that year and a new entity took the brand. Inter IKEA Foundation states it directly: "Inter IKEA Foundation, based in Liechtenstein, is the ultimate owner of Inter IKEA Holding B.V.. The foundation was established in 2023 after a demerger of Interogo Foundation." The group financial summary confirms it from the other side: "Inter IKEA Group is fully owned and controlled by Inter IKEA Foundation, based in Liechtenstein."
Interogo Foundation, established 1989, still exists and is the ultimate owner of Interogo Holding AG, a Swiss investment company in Pfaffikon that reported 27.88 billion euros of equity and 33.6 billion under management at 31 December 2025. On equity that is the larger half. Inter IKEA Holding B.V. carried 18,815 million euros of shareholders equity at 31 August 2025.
The brand half rests on almost nothing in nominal terms. Inter IKEA Holding B.V. has issued 126 shares at 1,000 euros par: "The Company has issued 1 class A share and 125 class B shares. All shares are held by Inter IKEA Foundation as the 100% shareholder and ultimate owner." The articles split dividends between a Dividend Reserve A and a Dividend Reserve B, with 5 percent of the class A aggregate par value added to Reserve A each year, which is fifty euros. Everything else goes to class B, and both classes sit in the same hand.
What the heirs got
Not shares. Inter IKEA Foundation puts it as bluntly as corporate documents ever get: "The Kamprad family are irrevocably excluded from all direct and indirect benefit without recompense. If any family member becomes employed in any of the businesses owned by Inter IKEA Foundation, they would only be eligible for a salary under the same terms as any other co-worker. This also applies to board fees, which can be paid under the same conditions as those paid to non-family board members."
What they got is seats, and the seats are the mechanism.
On the Dutch side there are three foundations doing three jobs. INGKA Foundation, established in 1982 when Kamprad transferred the retail group to it, owns the company. IMAS Foundation manages the money. IKEA Foundation gives it away and puts its all-time grants at 3 billion euros. The boards of INGKA and IMAS are the same five people: Johan Kuylenstierna as chair, Jonas Kamprad, Anders Moberg, Krister Mattsson and Peter Kamprad. Two of five is the ceiling, and INGKA states it: "the Kamprad family may occupy up to two of the five seats on the INGKA Foundation Board. This means the family can be involved in the Foundation but does not control it."
On the Liechtenstein side a three-member Foundation Council holds the decision-making power, and above it sits a body that hires and fires it. On the foundation's own governance page the Advisory Council's role "is advisory, and to dismiss and appoint members of the Foundation Council. The Advisory Council has seven seats, and the Kamprad family must always be in minority." Mathias Kamprad holds one of those seven. The council also renews itself: "Successors of outgoing members of the Advisory Council are appointed through nomination from the outgoing member, and for non-Kamprad-family followed by a vote among the members of the Advisory Council." Control changes hands one seat at a time, nominated by the person leaving and, for the non-family seats, ratified by the sitting members. There is no way in from outside.
Mathias Kamprad also sits on the seven-member Supervisory Board of Inter IKEA Holding B.V. itself, chaired by Anders Dahlvig, a former Ingka chief executive. Total remuneration for all seven supervisory directors in FY25 was 0.6 million euros, against 3.6 million for the two-person management board. That, and not a dividend, is what the brand half of IKEA pays a Kamprad heir. The names also recur across entities that are legally unrelated: Soren Hansen chairs Interogo Holding AG, sits on the Inter IKEA Foundation Advisory Council and sits on that Delft supervisory board. Every box is separate on paper and staffed by an overlapping cast in practice, which is the pattern the Wallenberg foundations run in Sweden.
The purpose that could never be changed
The most repeated line about IKEA is that its owner is a charity dedicated to interior design and that the purpose can never be altered. It traces to one article. In May 2006 The Economist wrote that "the Kamprad billions are dedicated to 'innovation in the field of architectural and interior design'. The articles of association of Stichting Ingka Foundation, a public record in the Netherlands, state that this object cannot be amended."
The statutes were revised in 2013, according to the Greens/EFA study, which recorded the new objectives as free from any profit motive with funds usable only for charitable causes or to fund the IKEA Group. INGKA Foundation today states a charitable purpose aimed at people in need, and the grant making it funds is about poverty and climate, not sofas. The object on record today is not the one the Economist described. Nobody publishes the before and after, so I cannot show which clause moved, only that the unamendable object is no longer what the foundation says it does. What did prove immovable sits in the Liechtenstein charter instead: "The purpose of Inter IKEA Foundation itself, however, can never be changed, as long as it is possible to fulfil the same." The permanent thing in this structure was never the charitable object. It was the exclusion of the family.
The structure everyone still describes
IKEA earned its reputation for opacity, with an arrangement that no longer exists. In 2006 the brand half was a Luxembourg holding owned by an identically named company in the Netherlands Antilles, run by a Curacao trust company, with beneficial owners the group declined to identify. Interogo Foundation was not publicly known at all until Swedish investigative journalist Magnus Svenungsson exposed it in 2011, as the Greens/EFA study recounts.
The European Commission file sets out the machinery. Under a Dutch ruling of 9 March 2006, Inter IKEA Systems paid a gross licence fee of 79 percent of franchise income to I.I. Holding S.A. in Luxembourg with 9 percent of costs reimbursed, so "the licence fee effectively paid by Systems to Holding amounted to the difference between these two percentages, i.e. 70% of the franchise income." I.I. Holding paid no corporate tax under Luxembourg's Holding 1929 status, a regime the Commission had ruled illegal in July 2006 and required repealed by the end of 2010. In December 2009 the rights moved to Largo Brands Corporation AVV in Aruba, which the Netherlands told the Commission had exempt status on account of its charitable character. On 21 December 2011 Interogo transferred them at a stated 9 billion euros, 40 percent as share premium and 5.4 billion converted into a loan at a fixed 6 percent over twelve years, roughly 324 million euros a year of interest deducted in the Netherlands. The Commission records that the lender's rights moved on, first to a Luxembourg entity and then to Interogo Holding AG in Switzerland. In the Commission's words, "a significant part of Inter IKEA Systems' franchise profits after 2011 was shifted to its parent in Liechtenstein."
Two corrections belong here. The famous one billion euro figure is nobody's finding; it is an estimate from a study titled IKEA: Flat Pack Tax Avoidance, written by Marc Auerbach and commissioned by the Greens/European Free Alliance group, published 12 February 2016, and the Commission's own decision describes it exactly that way, as a report published by a political group. And there has been no ruling. The Commission opened case SA.46470 on 18 December 2017, published its opening decision on 6 April 2018 and complemented it on 10 July 2020. Inter IKEA's FY25 annual report, signed in Delft on 6 November 2025, still says it "is not possible to assess a financial impact, if any, of the outcome of this EC investigation." Eight years, no decision, while the Fiat, Starbucks, Apple and Amazon cases all reached one.
The charge that is still running
The 2011 loan is gone. Inter IKEA Group reports non-current liabilities of 72 million euros at 31 August 2025, described as long-term loans payable to third parties, and how the 5.4 billion euro note was settled is not disclosed anywhere I could find.
What sat alongside it is still on the balance sheet. The IKEA proprietary rights are carried at a purchase price of 11,800 million euros, amortised over an assessed economic life of 45 years, with accumulated amortisation of 3,255 million and a FY25 charge of 273 million. Roughly a quarter of a billion euros a year runs through the accounts as amortisation and keeps running into the 2050s. Whether the Dutch tax deduction tracks the book charge is not stated in any filing I read, and it is close to the heart of what the Commission is still asking.
There is a second thing worth staring at. The Commission decision says the Sale and Purchase Agreement valued the rights at 9 billion euros. Inter IKEA books the same 2011 acquisition at 11,800 million. Two documents, one transaction, two prices, and nothing I read reconciles them. The agreement did contain a price adjustment keyed to fair market value at the end of 2023, but that cannot explain a figure the accounts already date to 2011, so I am not asserting a link.
The rest cuts against the slogan that IKEA pays nothing. Inter IKEA Group's FY25 effective tax rate was 21.3 percent, up from 17.5 percent, and Ingka Group's was 32.8 percent on 689 million euros of corporate income tax. The live question is not whether tax is paid but where profit lands, and Inter IKEA publishes that itself: the Netherlands books 833.6 million euros of profit with 1,162 employees, and Switzerland 657.5 million on 24,529.8 million of revenue with 474.
The ledger reading
Ingvar Kamprad died on 27 January 2018. The announcement published by Interogo says he is mourned by four children, not the three sons who are always named. Three of them, Peter, Jonas and Mathias, hold the governance seats. No fourth name appears on any board list I could find, and there are no shares for one to appear against.
Inter IKEA Foundation states the design goal out loud: "The foundation ownership prevents a fragmentation of ownership, which potentially could occur in case of family or public ownership." No heir can force a sale, because no heir owns a share. No buyer can accumulate a position, because there is no position. Two consecutive years of falling retail sales produce no activist letter, because there is no shareholder to write one.
The price is that the wall keeps the family out too: two seats of five in Leiden, one of seven in Vaduz, one of seven on a Delft supervisory board, and 0.6 million euros of fees split among seven people. Set that against the Ford family's supervoting stock, which turns under 2 percent of the equity into a permanent 40 percent of the vote and pays tens of millions a year in dividends. Ford kept the cash flow and the control. Kamprad kept only the control, and capped even that at a minority by charter.
How large the pot has grown since 1982 is the one thing nobody outside can check, because neither Dutch foundation publishes accounts, and a Dutch foundation without public-benefit status is not obliged to. What does not survive contact with the filings is the popular version of this company: a secret Curacao trust, a Liechtenstein foundation called Interogo, a European Parliament ruling and a billion euros of back tax. Not one of those is the current record.
Related reading
- Three Empires, No Owners: How Foundations and Holding Companies Rule Tata, IKEA, and Agnelli: the comparison this article drills into.
- The Wallenberg Foundation Empire: the same device run with listed voting shares instead.
- The Agnelli Chain: Four Boxes, One Loyalty Share, and Control of Ferrari: what it looks like when the family does keep the shares.
- Two Percent of the Company, Forty Percent of the Vote: the opposite trade, control kept with the dividends attached.
- The Working Ledgers: the market and the money underneath every family-controlled company.
Fact-check notes and sources
Every figure above links inline to the document it came from. Four caveats belong on the record.
- Primary filings: Ownership, share structure, financials, boards, remuneration, the intangible and the state aid status come from the Inter IKEA Holding B.V. Annual Report FY25 signed 6 November 2025, the Inter IKEA Group Financial Summary FY25, the Ingka Group Annual Summary FY25, the Ingka Group Tax Report FY25, the foundations' governance pages, the Interogo Holding AG Annual Report 2025, Inter IKEA's country-by-country report and Commission decision C(2017) 8753 final.
- Reported, not confirmed: The 2013 revision of the Stichting INGKA statutes, the 2011 exposure of Interogo Foundation and the family's ownership of Ikano Group rest on the Greens/EFA study, not a primary record, and the Ikano statement is a February 2016 one being read in 2026. Anders Dahlvig's history as chief executive of the retail group is general public record rather than something any of these filings states. Ingka counts twelve franchisees to Inter IKEA's thirteen, the difference being Inter IKEA's in-house retail arm.
- My arithmetic: The roughly 212 million euro Ingka dividend, the "close to two billion euros" total and the roughly 324 million euros of annual interest on the 2011 loan are calculated from disclosed rates and percentages.
- Unpublished: Neither Dutch foundation files accounts or articles of association, and INGKA's Dutch public-benefit status is unconfirmed here. The settlement of the 5.4 billion euro loan is unexplained in any document I could read, as is the gap between the 9 billion euro value the Commission records for the 2011 agreement and the 11,800 million euro price Inter IKEA books for the same acquisition. Since the 2023 demerger Interogo Foundation no longer publishes its council membership. I read the 2017 opening decision in full but not the 2020 extension, whose dates come from Inter IKEA's own accounts.
This post is informational and journalistic, describing public corporate filings, foundation disclosures and European Commission documents. It is not tax, legal or investment advice, and no affiliation with Inter IKEA Group, Ingka Group, any IKEA foundation or any person named is implied or endorsed. The state aid investigation described here is open and has produced no decision and no finding of wrongdoing. Figures are as reported for the financial years stated and change.
