IKEA's first India store to offer over 7,000 products

Hyderabad: Leading Swedish home furnishings retailer IKEA will offer over 7,000 products at its first India store opening here next year, it said on Wednesday.

The product range will be affordable and will offer something for every home with almost 1,000 products priced below Rs 200, said company officials.

Ahead of the store launch planned in the spring of 2018, IKEA opened its experiential centre, providing a sneak peek into its products and solutions.

Designed for six months, IKEA Hej Home has come up in Forum Mall in Kukatpally near Hitec City. Officials said the products here were only for display.

The customers can touch, feel and experience some of the products which will be available at the store and start preparing their wish list.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, IKEA designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories, and is considered to be the largest furniture retailer in the world.

The four lakh square feet store is coming up on a 13-acre site in Hitec City, the Information Technology corridor, with an investment of Rs 1,000 crore. It will create direct jobs for 800 people; half of them, the company promises, will be women.

The store will also have a 1,000-seat restaurant, the largest in IKEA`s global network of over 400 stores. It will offer both Indian and Swedish cuisine.

Ulf Smedberg, Country Marketing Manager, IKEA India, said they plan to open 25 stores in India by 2025. The next store will come up in Mumbai in 2019. This will be bigger than the Hyderabad store with five lakh square feet.

It has also purchased land in Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR for opening the stores. Smedberg said they were looking at both metropolitan and tier-II cities for setting up stores.

Marie Lundstrom, Creative Director, Home Furnishings, IKEA, said they were sourcing some of the products like mattresses and sofas from local suppliers to cut the cost.

IKEA has been sourcing from India for the last 30 years and it plans to double its sourcing volumes by 2020 for sales at its stores in the country and also abroad. It currently has 53 suppliers in India and the number is expected to go up with the opening of more stores.

Around 45,000 people work directly for IKEA suppliers in India and about 400,000 in the extended supply chain.

Company officials said they were also exploring the opportunity to manufacture the products, especially in the fabrics segment.

IKEA Foundation, the company`s philanthropic arm, is currently training 100 women in retail skills in Hyderabad. John Achillea, Store Manager, IKEA Hyderabad, said the number would be increased to 300 and some of the trained women will be placed in the Hyderabad store.

Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, Industry, Commerce and Information Technology, government of Telangana, said that the state government has given three incentives to IKEA.

These include 100 per cent reimbursement for stamp duty, a discount of Rs 1 for each unit of electricity consumed for the next five years and part reimbursement for training women.

IKEA currently has 403 stores in 49 countries with a sales volume of 38.3 billion euros. About 783 million customers visited IKEA stores in FY17 and more than 2.3 billion people visited IKEA online.