The Wall Street Journal and Brandchannel report that the IKEA trade mark was recently valued at 9 billion euro. The figure is interesting, not only because of its stratospheric level, but also because it is the first time the value of its brand was officially assessed and disclosed by the Swedish furniture empire.

A sale of this strategic asset was the reason why its value had to be estimated. In a rather complex and opaque group structure, and according to the press reports, the ownership of the trade mark portfolio was transferred from the Interogo Foundation to its Dutch subsidiary Inter Ikea Systems B.V. on January 1, 2012.

As previously reported on Class 46, IKEA is among the top brands that regularly appear in the Brandz and Interbrand listings of most valuable global trade marks. Interbrand listed IKEA brand value at 11,86 billion USD in 2011 (about 9,65 billion euro at current exchange rate), whereas, in its 2012 ranking, Brandz quoted IKEA at 9,2 billion USD (about 7,5 billion euro at current rate).

Even if they are not that far from the figure revealed by IKEA, those two values were calculated using in-house methods, not the ISO norm 10668:2010 dealing with "specifies requirements for procedures and methods of monetary brand value measurement". From a 2011 article on The Local website, while the exact ownership of the trade marks is not very clear, one can note that a "large part of Inter Ikea's proceeds comes from the 3 percent in royalties on all sales that every Ikea store must pay to the parent company for the right to use the concept." In the evaluation process, said licensing revenues stream might be relevant -when applying ISO approved methods-, if such "concept" includes the mark.