Swedish furniture retailing giant IKEA will open its first store in India at Hyderabad in the second half of 2017 even as it scouts for more sites in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
The company, which received government approval in 2013 for its Rs 10,500 crore proposal to open retail stores under 100 per cent FDI, plans to open 25 stores by 2025 in nine Indian cities.
“We will open our first store in Hyderabad in later half of 2017. Digging for construction of our first store in India started this week,” IKEA Asia Pacific Retail President Mikael Palmquist was quoted by PTI as saying.
IKEA’s first store in Hyderabad will be a massive 4 lakh square feet in size and will include all features of a global IKEA store, including restaurant and play and development area, he added.
In July last year, the company had announced purchase of 13 acre land close to the IT hub in Hyderabad’s HITEC city.
Bullish on the Indian market, Palmquist told PTI IKEA expects its stores in the country to be among “the most visited stores in the world” and hence the company has prepared for it by planning bigger restaurants and more seating capacity to suit high visitation stores.
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