How IKEA Spread From One Small Swedish Town

In 1958 IKEA opened one store in Älmhult, a small town in southern Sweden. This is every IKEA store we could date since then, on the year it opened: 514 stores, 476 of them open today, in 62 countries. CHAPTERS 0:00 One store in Älmhult, 1958 2:13 America 3:42 100 IKEA stores 4:40 The boom: Russia and China 8:54 New worlds: India and Latin America 9:47 Kyiv and Russia close What the map shows. Every blue dot with a yellow ring is an IKEA store; a new store flashes the IKEA mark, the first store in a country shows it larger, and the year IKEA arrived appears on the country. A closed store turns into a grey ring. Countries turn darker blue as their store count grows. The gold line runs from Älmhult to the farthest store at the time. Along the way: IKEA's first try in Japan ended in 1986 and came back 20 years later; the store in Yugoslavia closed in 1992; every store in Russia closed in March 2022. A note on the numbers. Most stores are dated to the year only, so within a year stores appear in an even order, east to west. Small pick-up points and planning studios are not on the map. The three stores on the Canary Islands are counted, but the islands are too small to draw on a world map. SOURCES Stores and opening years: Swedish Wikipedia list of IKEA stores, completed from IKEA and Ingka newsrooms and press reports (a source for every added store) Store locations: OpenStreetMap Country outlines, coastlines, lakes and islands: Natural Earth IMAGE CREDIT (Wikimedia Commons) IKEA Älmhult (6): Lesnydzban - CC BY 4.0 IKEA Kungens jan 2013a: Holger.Ellgaard - CC BY-SA 3.0 Ikea Alexandra Singapore (2025) - img 01: Chainwit. - CC BY 4.0 IKEA Älmhult (11): Lesnydzban - CC BY 4.0 Ikea, Uppsala - panoramio: Nicklas Ulvnäs - CC BY-SA 3.0 Ikea Alexandra Singapore (2025) - img 02: Chainwit. - CC BY 4.0 Kungens kurva, IKEA, 20241228 - 6: AleWi - CC BY-SA 4.0 Ikea warehouse, Birstall - geograph.org.uk - 1893543: Humphrey Bolton - CC BY-SA 2.0 IKEA Katowice: Lesnydzban - CC BY 4.0 Parkplatz IKEA Kiel: Christian Alexander Tietgen - CC BY-SA 3.0 IKEA Kaohsiung - panoramio: Nagono - CC BY-SA 3.0 IKEA Innaloo rear E entrance: Orderinchaos - CC BY-SA 4.0 IKEA and Decathlon in Southampton - geograph.org.uk - 7145529: Steve Daniels - CC BY-SA 2.0 IKEA Malmö (4406946334): Håkan Dahlström from Malmö, Sweden - CC BY 2.0 Entrance of IKEA Nagakute - 1: KKPCW - CC BY-SA 4.0 20210716 IKEA Zhengzhou 02: Windmemories - CC BY-SA 4.0 IKEA SM Mall of Asia Exterior: TheNuggeteer - CC BY-SA 4.0 IKEA at Encuentro Oceanía with flagpoles and metro entrance: Keizers - CC BY-SA 4.0 IKEA Kungens kurva kväll 2013: Holger.Ellgaard - CC BY-SA 3.0 When did IKEA come to your country?