Ikea, the cut-price Swedish furniture retailer, is set to make more job cuts on top of 5,000 redundancies announced last month.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of the furniture maker whose blue and yellow stores tarea spread around the globe, told a Swedish newspaper that it needed to reduce its staff even more.

“We need to reduce our personnel further especially within manufacturing and logistics,” the billionaire, now a tax exile in Switzerland, told Swedish business daily, Dagens Industri.

He did not comment on how many jobs would go and which countries would be impacted.

Mr Kamprad, who set up Ikea as a teenager in the 1940s, said that sales were 7 per cent less than the company had budgeted for, leaving a 8 billion Swedish kronor (£632 million) gap in its finances.

The company has already cut 5,000 jobs from its 120,000-strong workforce this year.

Anders Dahlvig, the chief executive of the privately owned group, said last month that its trend of rapid growth had been broken.

“We have never had to make such large cutbacks before,” Mr Dahlvig told Dagens Industri, the Swedish business newspaper. “But it is absolutely necessary in order to adjust our costs and our capacity to demand, which is much lower than we had expected.

Mr Dahlvig has said that he expected sales for the year ending August 31 to be €21.5 billion (£18.4 billion), just 1.5 per cent higher than last year, despite 14 new stores having opened. This represents a like-for-like sales decline — previously unheard of at Ikea.

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