The owner of the largest furniture company in the world, Inter IKEA, revealed on Friday that the company’s yearly profit more than doubled as cost pressures subsided, enabling it to lower prices and anticipate further reductions in the months ahead.

After struggling with high expenses and the fallout from closing its Russian manufacturing, the company, which supplies the stores it franchises the IKEA name to, achieved a pretax profit of 1.95 billion euros ($2.07 billion) in the year ending in August, up from 931 million the previous year.

Following a disturbed 2022, Chief Financial Officer Martin Van Dam told the media that the numbers were returning to normal.

“We were trying to make sure the retailer had the right price, and with the delay of (higher) prices we ended up harboring a lot of the costs that year. If you look at FY21, the returns are similar to now,” van Dam said.

As long as expenses continued to decline, the corporation promised to keep lowering prices.

“Costs trending downwards should positively affect prices for IKEA customers in the coming year and beyond,” it said in a statement.

It will take some time before shoppers in shops felt the full impact of the price reductions, according to van Dam, even though Inter IKEA had begun cutting prices to its franchisees in the final four months of its fiscal year.

(Adapted from LiveMint.com)

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