The store was formally inaugurated by Telangana’s Industry Minister K. T. Rama Rao along with first customer Rajni Venugopal, IKEA Group CEO Jesper Brodin and Sweden’s Ambassador to India Klas Molin. The first India store was opened five years after the world’s largest single brand retailer received government approval in 2013 to invest Rs 10,500 crore to open 25 stores in India by 2025. IKEA’s next store will open in Navi Mumbai in next summer, followed by Bengaluru and Delhi. In the next phase, IKEA would cover Ahmedabad, Surat, Pune, Chennai, and Kolkata.<doc-sep>Hyderabad: Ikea of Sweden opens its first Indian store in Hyderabad on Thursday, a ₹ 1,000-crore bet that affordable furniture and assisted assembly will draw buyers in the world’s fastest-growing economy to its swanky 400,000 sq ft outlet. It has been a milestone that’s more than a decade in the making, and the company expects to welcome as many as 6 million visitors a year. The showroom has some 7,500 products, of which about 1,000 will sell for less than ₹ 200 each. It’s the first of 25 stores Ikea plans to open across the country by 2025. Based on feedback from its home visits, Ikea expects a majority of sales in India to come from the living room and kitchen categories, the company’s country sales manager, Christian Kampe, said. Many people were keen to invest in their homes and make changes in their living rooms, he said. “We saw that it was very strong and these are the strategies, which will be our first step in going forward," he added. Ikea’s launch comes at least 12 years after it started studying India. Patrik Antoni, Ikea’s deputy country manager, said the company is also looking at smaller cities in the future. “People love homes here, this is the difference between India and other markets. If you want to party or just celebrate, you call people home," Antoni said. If two-seat sofas costing as little as ₹ 5,990 and ₹ 7,990 double-bed frames aren’t enough to lure shoppers, the Hyderabad store features a 1,000-seat restaurant—one of the largest across Ikea’s 400-strong global chain—that will serve a mix of Nordic and local dishes, including biryani for ₹ 99 a plate. Chicken and vegetarian meatballs, for ₹ 129 a serve, will replace the traditional Swedish ones made with beef and pork. Ikea has also acquired land in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Gurugram and plans to open shop in Surat, Chennai and Ahmedabad. “The pace of opening stores in India will intensify," said Harminder Sahni, founder and managing director of consulting firm Wazir Advisors in Gurugram. “Ikea has never failed; it’s never closed a single store in its history." According to GlobalData, a data and insights solution provider, rising disposable incomes and improving living conditions of urbanites present vast opportunities in India. Against the backdrop, the company forecasts the Indian home sector to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9% during 2016-2021 and reach ₹ 4.979 trillion by 2021. Ikea’s Kampe also pointed out that the ₹ 200 price tag was identified as a number that Indians will be attracted to. “We also have 500 products under ₹ 100 within the 1,000 items under ₹ 200," he said. Ikea’s competitors in India include Godrej Group’s Godrej Interio, Future Group’s HomeTown, Nilkamal Ltd’s @Home, and Durian Industries Pvt. Ltd’s namesake furniture business, along with mom-and-pop stores vying for an indoor furniture market predicted to expand about 8.8% annually through 2022, according to Euromonitor. Concerned that the absence of a strong do-it-yourself culture in India could impede acceptance of Ikea’s traditional model of self-assembling furniture, Ikea partnered with local start-up, UrbanClap, and hired 150 staff to offer paid delivery and assembly options, and plans to introduce an online store in conjunction with the opening of its Mumbai outlet in 2019. Around 950 people will be employed directly by Ikea in Hyderabad, with an additional 1,500 jobs created indirectly, a company spokesperson said. Kampe added that an average Ikea store does around €100 million of business (annually) and the company plans to watch how things go in the first year and achieve the same target in India as well, in the next five years. Bloomberg contributed to this story. Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.<doc-sep>After it opens in Hyderabad next month, IKEA will arrive in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, sometime in 2019. But the Swedish furniture retailer has some unusual plans for the 20 million residents of Mumbai and its neighbourhood. Not only will it build a signature big-box store on the city’s outskirts, IKEA will also debut its small stores there and launch an e-commerce service for what it believes is one of its most important markets in the country. Together, these will make IKEA’s Mumbai outing its “first multi-channel, multi-format destination for India,” a company spokesperson told Quartz. This is in contrast to the usual strategy followed by the company. Typically, it enters a market with a large store, and launches e-commerce much later. However, with purchasing patterns now alternating between physical stores and online, IKEA is shifting gears. “That (Mumbai) will be a super exciting market for IKEA because we have never entered a market like that before,” Patrik Antoni, IKEA’s deputy country manager in India told Quartz. ”(Mumbai) has a dense population. Therefore the need for a different solution is (present) there.” Mumbai is India’s largest city and among the world’s most populated. It is home to the country’s largest population of millionaires with a total wealth of $820 billion. However, it is also the world’s second-most densely populated urban centre with a burgeoning middle class. That makes housing and space a big challenge. The retail giant began constructing its 4,30,000 square feet store in Turbhe, Navi Mumbai, in May 2017. This IKEA store will serve residents of eight different municipal corporations under the Mumbai metropolitan region, including Thane, Kalyan-Dombivili, and, Navi Mumbai, besides Mumbai itself. IKEA also plans to launch small-format stores—typically sized between 1,500 and 2,000 square feet—in Mumbai to give shoppers a look and feel of the larger store. Such stores will be digitally connected, offering shoppers an option to place online orders. The company is yet to announce the location of such an outlet. “There is no land available, you cannot build stores around the city, unlike Delhi, where you can open stores on the outskirts and people can access it,” Antoni added, explaining the need to launch multiple-retail formats in the city. It’s an approach that analysts agree with. “Mumbai is a large city with a big access problem,” said Aditya Sachdeva, director for retail at real estate consulting firm Knight Frank India. “They cannot serve certain suburbs of Mumbai with just a Navi Mumbai store. There’s traffic and the distances are too long.” Locations apart, Mumbai’s IKEA stores will also be curated for local needs. The city’s small apartments where residents make the most of cramped spaces—for instance, a single room often doubles up for multiple purposes like sleeping, dining, and even dressing—will serve as an inspiration for the store layout, Antoni said. And as it expands to more Indian cities, IKEA might replicate its strategy of having smaller stores. In all, the company has outlined a plan to set up to 25 outlets across India over the next decade.<doc-sep>Mumbai: Ikea spent 12 years studying India and visited 1,000 homes in major cities to see how its people lived. Today, as a few dozen early shoppers walked through the doors as the emporium opened in Hyderabad, the acid test began of whether the furniture giant understands what Indian consumers want. “I have no plans to blow a lot of money today, maybe just buy some kitchenware, but this is going to be a destination for me," said Rajani Venugopal, a businesswoman who waited about an hour and managed to be the first person in the doors. Some 380 million Indians, a population bigger than the entire US, will join the middle class in the seven years through 2022. Ikea’s 400,000-square-foot Hyderabad store is the first step in the retailer’s plans for India, with more outlets scheduled to debut in Mumbai, Bengaluru and the New Delhi area soon after. By 2025, the company hopes to have 25 stores in the country. “Ikea has an opportunity to pioneer modern retailing in the home improvement sector," said Ankur Bisen, head of retail and consumer division at Technopak Advisors Pvt., an Indian consulting firm based near New Delhi. India’s 1.3 billion people spend about $30 billion a year on furniture and household items like bed linens and cookware, but 95% of those items are sold by small shops that offer custom-built products, according to Technopak. View Full Image Kitchen supplies sit on display inside the IKEA retail store in Hyderabad, India, on Wednesday. Photo: Bloomberg What started as a trickle of shoppers at 10am, when the store opened, had turned into a steady stream about an hour later. Ikea expects as many as 6 million visitors annually at the store in the Hyderabad suburb known as Hitec City, a town full of new apartment towers where multinationals like Amazon.com, Dell Inc. and Deloitte have offices. Among the first shoppers was Peraka Sadanandan, a man who had taken an overnight train with his wife to buy a sofa. The 48-year-old said he was a little surprised to discover that Ikea wasn’t offering furniture assembly services to people who live outside the Hyderabad area, but he was undeterred. “We have an old house," he said. “We plan to refurbish it." Indian shoppers aren’t used to assembling their furniture themselves, so Ikea is offering to deliver items and install them at people’s homes, if they live nearby enough. View Full Image A Ikea worker arranges decorations insinde a living room display at the new IKEA store in Hyderabad on 8 August 2018. Photo: AFP Other tweaks to the retailer’s model appear at its 1,000-seat cafeteria, where half the menu items, including samosa and seasoned biryani rice, are Indian favourites. Ikea’s iconic Swedish meatball are made of chicken or vegetables, to meet Hindu strictures against eating beef. “Food is the entry point," said store manager John Achillea. View Full Image Customers eats at a restaurant at the new IKEA store in Hyderabad on 9 August 2018. Samosa and seasoned biryani rice, are Indian favourites. Photo:AFP The furniture lineup includes more folding chairs and stools — flexible seating —for Indian households where relatives tend to pop in. Cabinets and countertops come at lower heights because India women tend to be shorter than Europeans and Americans. And since children often sleep in the same room as their parents, one model bedroom includes a child’s bed amid all the furniture. The store also stocks at least 500 products that are priced under ₹ 100. “Yes, we did something different for the India market,"Ikea Group’s Chief Executive Officer Jesper Brodin said in an interview. “Indian looks are super important. We need to connect to the Indian solutions." Venkatesh Pola, a 38-year-old pharmacist from a nearby town, who’d bought a stool and some glassware, said he loved the store’s automatic checkout. “This DIY experience was amazing," he said. “I’d never touched a scanning machine in my life. At first I couldn’t find the barcodes or figure out how to pay. But after doing it myself, I feel great." Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now! ! Topics<doc-sep>
New Delhi: Swedish furniture major Ikea, which will open its first India store in Hyderabad tomorrow, expects to launch its Mumbai store next year, according to a top executive. The Mumbai store is under construction and is expected to open next summer, Ikea’s India country manager Peter Betzel told Reuters, adding that India will be one of Ikea’s biggest sourcing markets in the future. Ikea is opening its first India store at a 13-acre complex in Hitec City, Hyderabad, and expects to welcome as many as 7 million visitors a year. IKEA has set up a 150 member task force to help customers assemble furniture and is also partnering with UrbanClap, an app that connects people with a variety of service providers, including carpenters. IKEA had initially planned to open 25 stores across the nation by 2025. In June, the company said it was likely to open more stores, possibly some smaller stores in cities to complement their typically larger showrooms in suburbs. The company has bought land in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and Gurugram, and is also looking to expand into Surat, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chennai and Pune. Mint had previously reported that Ikea plans to open a store in Mumbai in 2019 and will also allow consumers to buy online following the Mumbai launch. With the Mumbai launch, the company will also experiment with new business models like home furnishing consultancy. Under this model, customers who become a part of the Ikea Family Members programme can request personal meetings with Ikea co-workers who visit their homes, understand their dreams and needs and get personalized recommendations. With Agency Inputs Subscribe to Mint Newsletters * Enter a valid email * Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. Never miss a story! Stay connected and informed with Mint. Download our App Now!! Topics