By Prarthana Mitra
The world’s leading furniture retailer IKEA is set to enter the Indian market. With an investment of Rs 1000 crore, the Swedish furnishings chain will inaugurate its first Indian store in Hyderabad next month according to officials in IKEA Telangana.
Here’s what you can expect
John Achillea, IKEA Telangana’s Managing Director on Thursday announced that the store will help in the creation of nearly 800 jobs and reserve over half of them for women.
The store will occupy 4 lakh square feet, sprawling over an area of 13 acres. It will offer over 7,000 IKEA products including furniture, fixtures, kitchen appliances, interior decor and home accessories, half of which have been priced below Rs 200. It will also have IKEA’s largest restaurant in over 400 global stores with a capacity to seat 1000 people.
Furniture wonderland for the desi modern family. Credit: Ed MitchellHere’s what happened
Following the Foreign Investment Promotion Board’s approval of their investment proposal, the company officials announced their plans to open 25 stores in India by 2025. The company plans to open its next store in Mumbai and it will be larger than the Hyderabad store, occupying 5 lakh square metres.
While the primary focus is on leaving a mark with brick-and-mortar stores all over the country, IKEA also complements it with a “multichannel approach to create many offline and online touch points for customers.” IKEA also plans to roll out tie-ups with e-commerce platforms like Flipkart (now Walmart) and Amazon India in 2019.
Over the past three years, the global giant has kept itself busy with building fixed assets, training staff, creating infrastructure including land and distribution centres in India, ahead of the grand opening in mid-2018.
So far, we have invested in four land sites Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurugram and also looking at sites in other cities, said Patrik Antoni, deputy country manager, IKEA India in an interview with the Economic Times. We have our first distribution centre open in Pune now that will serve the IKEA stores in the country, and will invest close to Rs 750 crore in the future to develop more capacity.”
Why you should care
Headquartered in the Netherlands, IKEA is bringing its trademark ready-to-assemble line of furniture to India at a time when there is a mad scramble among global corporations for a piece of the growing Indian consumers’ market.
In a country where three-fourths of the furniture industry is still dominated by standalone stores and carpenters, IKEA’s entry is likely to cause quite a disruption. IKEA will bring the self-help furniture-assemblage culture to the new age Indian household.
The shift in the nature of consumer behaviour in India has led to a marked increase in demand, which new and indigenous furniture brands are rushing to cater to. Whether IKEA will destabilise and displace these agents is debatable, but one can no longer ignore the necessity and perks of affordable living today.