In this paper, we prove the existence of the ground state for the spinor Bose–Einstein condensates with an external Ioffe–Pitchard magnetic field in the one-dimensional case. We also characterise the ground states of spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates with an external Ioffe–Pitchard magnetic field; that is, for ferromagnetic systems, we show that, under some condition, searching for the ground state of ferromagnetic spin-1 Bose–Einstein condensates with an external Ioffe–Pitchard magnetic field can be reduced to a ‘one-component’ minimisation problem.