
Swedish retail giant IKEA's first ever store in India will finally open on Thursday in Hyderabad after years of its announcement.
The announcement was first made six years ago after about 12 years of planning, reports said. The world's largest furniture retailer plans to open a total of 25 stores by 2025.
The first IKEA store is a 13-acre complex in Hitec City on the outskirts of Hyderabad. The showroom will display some 7,500 products and nearly 1,000 of which would sell for less than Rs 200 a piece. It expects six million customers in a year.
IKEA hopes to overtake the US to become the world's second-largest middle-class market by 2022 in India. The world's biggest furniture retailer invested more than 10 billion rupees on its first foray in India.
By then, sales of homewares and home furnishings will probably reach US $15.3 billion from US $12.9 billion last year, according to researcher Euromonitor International.
"Rising incomes and affluence make for an attractive market in India," said Sowmya Adiraju, a research analyst with Euromonitor in Bengaluru, in an email. "Indian consumers are curious to see what IKEAhas to offer and the retailer is well-positioned to meet this demand," as quoted by Reuters.
The store will have a 1000 seater restaurant, its largest ever in the world.
An IKEA is slated to open in early 2019 in Mumbai, followed by stores in urban Bengaluru and metropolitan Delhi. Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Surat and Pune are also targeted for stores. Elsewhere in Asia, it plans to set up shop in the Philippines and Vietnam and open additional stores in Bangkok, Thailand, within the next few years.
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.
Some 950 people will be employed directly by IKEA in Hyderabad, with an additional 1,500 jobs created indirectly, a company spokesperson said.
IKEA said in December it plans to have 15,000 staff in India by 2025, half of whom will be women. Recent recruits in Hyderabad include eight female forklift drivers and 100 young people from a government-backed program supporting underprivileged women entering the workforce.
(Inputs from Reuters)