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The Founder's Notes

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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Retail · Inter IKEA Group (franchisor) and Ingka Group (largest franchisee)

IKEA

Designs furniture backwards from a target price, then hands the customer the warehouse work, the transport and the assembly in exchange for that price.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

IKEA does not sell you furniture. It sells you a discount for doing its last mile of work yourself.
The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Own it
Own it

Moat

Wide

Scale economics · Counter-positioning · Brand · Process power

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power
Competitive rivalry
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitutes
Buyer power
Supplier power

Headline figures

IKEA retail sales
~€45.1B
Franchise fee
3% of net sales
Customer labour cost to IKEA
€0
Age of the founder at founding
17
Net sales
$638B
AWS share of operating income
~58%
Retail operating margin
~5.4%
Third-party share of units
~60%

Unit economics

One BILLY bookcase, standard white

The line that reads €0 is the business. Any competitor matching the €60 price must pay for delivery and assembly out of a margin that has already gone.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

If paid delivery and assembly services rose past roughly a fifth of retail sales while the price gap to conventional furniture retailers narrowed, the arbitrage would be closing and IKEA would be converting into an ordinary furniture retailer with an unusually good brand. That is measurable in IKEA's own annual reporting, and it is the number I would watch above store count or revenue.
If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

No mechanisms in common

These two share no tagged mechanism, which usually means the comparison is about contrast rather than pattern — a useful thing to know before you start writing.