In response to Putin’s war in Ukraine IKEA ‘had to say goodbye’ to 10,000 employees in Russia

IKEA has axed 10,000 jobs in Russia out of 12,000 of their retail employees in a direct response to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Russia was IKEA’s 10^th largest market in retail sale in the year to August 2021 which made up €1.8 billion or 4% of it’s trade.

The Swedish furniture giant said that they had posted a 6% rise in full year sales amid a very “challenging” year due to rising inflation.

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.

Jesper Brodin, the CEO of Ingka, a holding company which is in charge of most of IKEA’s stores, told AFP that they “had to say goodbye.”

Around 10,000 staff have now lost their jobs out of the 12,000 retail employees across their stores in Russian.