World Business

Stockholm: Swedish furniture giant Ikea reported Thursday a one-percent drop in sales for its 2024-2025 fiscal year, due to its price reductions and consumers tightening purse strings. Sales for the full year, which closed at the end of August, fell to 44.6 billion euros ($52 billion) but volumes and the number of customers rose by three percent, Ikea's holding company Inter Ikea said. "We have prioritised lower prices, volume and customer growth the last two years," Inter Ikea chief executive Jon Abrahamsson Ring told AFP. The company has reduced its prices by 10 percent over the past two years, in a bid to revive traffic at its online and brick-and-mortar stores. At the same time, "for several years in a row now, consumer confidence has been decreasing", Abrahamsson Ring said. "The past year it has flattened out, but it's still on a very low level compared to many decades back," he added. As a result, consumers are holding off before deciding to renovate their homes or buy new furniture. "And that we see not just in one region. We see it across all 63 markets." Inter Ikea plans to continue to lower its prices "but it will be more on the normalised level of somewhere between one to three percent every year", Abrahamsson Ring said. He said the current fiscal year was "starting well", noting that the group was continuing to "grow in volume ... in customers and in visitation, (and) we're also growing in money". Rule-based trade 'always the best' Abrahamsson Ring also called for "predictable and consistent" tariff policies, after US President Donald Trump's fresh tariffs on imported wood, furniture and kitchen cabinets took effect this week. Much of Ikea's furnishings sold in the United States are imported from Europe, subjecting them to a 15-percent tariff agreed in a trade deal reached in July between the United States and the European Union. The company is therefore not affected by the new 25 percent rate imposed on certain upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets. "We are following this very closely but we believe that the agreement that the European Union and the US has made on the 15 percent, at least that gives us predictability, which is the most important thing," he said. "We believe that open rule-based trade is always the best... We think that's of course good for Ikea, but it's also good for the world," Abrahamsson Ring said.

World Business

Zurich: Nestle, the Swiss food giant whose brands include Nespresso coffee and Perrier water, announced Thursday plans to cut 16,000 jobs worldwide over the next two years, sending its share price soaring. "The world is changing, and Nestle needs to change faster," chief executive Philipp Navratil, who took the reins of the multinational in early September, said in a statement. That included making "hard but necessary decisions to reduce headcount", he said. The company's shares shot up more than eight percent in morning trading, helping to make the overall Zurich stock market the best performing in Europe. Navratil spoke as the company published nine-month figures showing sales down by 1.9 percent to 65.9 billion Swiss francs ($83 billion). The job cuts represent about six percent of its staff. The layoffs include 12,000 white-collar jobs over the next two years, saving the company one billion Swiss francs -- which it said was double what had been previously planned. Another 4,000 job cuts are already underway in production and the supply chain. Navratil said Nestle was increasing its savings target to three billion Swiss francs by the end of 2027, up from the previous target of 2.5 billion. The chief executive's message is that "he is going on the offensive", said Jean-Philippe Bertshy, an analyst at international investment firm Vontobel, adding that the "first steps are going in the right direction". Nestle, which owns more than 2,000 brands, including KitKat chocolate bars, Maggi seasonings and Purina dog food, experienced a turbulent September, with the dismissal of its previous CEO over an office relationship. That was followed by the earlier-than-expected departure of its chairman. Nestle has also been rocked by a scandal surrounding its bottled water brands that erupted in France in 2024. 'We must do more' Financial analysts hope that Navratil will succeed in restoring stability to the group, which has seen its growth falter since 2022. The decline in the headline sales figure was partly due to currency swings. Organic sales growth amounted to 3.3 percent in the first nine months of 2025, driven by price increases of 2.8 percent. "Results are starting to come through. Now we must do more and move faster to accelerate our growth momentum," said Navratil. The company said coffee and confectionery contributed the most to organic growth, with double-digit price increases in some markets. Patrik Schwendimann, an analyst at Zurich Cantonal Bank, said volumes in the third quarter alone were much higher than expected. Volumes increased 1.5 percent between July and the end of September, well above the forecasts of financial analysts surveyed by the Swiss agency AWP, whose median expectation was that they were up 0.3 percent.

Qatar Business

Washington: Governor of Qatar Central Bank and Chairman of Qatar Investment Authority, HE Sheikh Bandar bin Mohammed bin Saoud Al-Thani met with Chairman of Citigroup, John Dugan and Chairman of Euroclear Group, Francesco Vanni d'Archirafi on the sidelines of the 2025 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) held in Washington DC in the United States of America from 13 to 18 October 2025. During the meetings, they reviewed the latest global developments in banking and finance.