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Ikea to slash 110 jobs in southern Sweden

The Local Sweden
The Local Sweden - [email protected]
Ikea to slash 110 jobs in southern Sweden
Ikea's staff cuts announced on Thursday will hit Sweden the hardest. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

Swedish furniture giant Ikea is slashing 110 jobs in southern Sweden as it shifts its strategy towards e-commerce.

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The company on Thursday announced plans to cut 90 staff in Malmö, and a further 20 shared between Helsingborg and its headquarters in Älmhult.
 
The cuts to staff working in human resources, sustainability, marketing, and communication, will also see people losing their jobs in Belgium and The Netherlands. 
 
"In Ikea we're in the middle of a big transformation agenda," Tolga Öncü, the group's retail manager, told The Local. "This change led us to the tough decision to announce the 150 redundancies today." 
 
The company, he said, was carrying out "a deep analysis" to ensure it is a "more simple, organization, that is more agile and less bureaucratic".  
 
Öncü said that the company had yet to announce which individual employees would be losing their jobs, or to decide if further redundancies were on the horizon.  
 
"This morning we had our internal announcement, we have shared it with all our coworkers in our group, and at the moment we are in negotiations with the unions," he said. 
 
"This is where we are at the moment and we are continuing our transformation work, and we can't exclude any more changes in our organization structure." 
 
In an interview with the Sydsvenskan newspaper, Öncü said that the transformation was part of the companies move towards online retailing.  
 
"The business model throughout our 75-year history has been to work through a single channel, our stores," he explained. 
 
"Today we are entering in a world where we want to connect with our customers across several channels. That means we need to look at how we organize ourselves." 
 
The company now plans to focus more heavily on opening stores in town centres and online. 
 

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