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Swedish home furnishing retailer IKEA plans to open three stores in Mumbai. This would include a flagship store in Navi Mumbai as well as two smaller outlets. It is also looking at recruiting 1,000 people, mainly for the Navi Mumbai store, which is set to open within a year.
Jaxa Gohil, Store Manager, IKEA India, told BusinessLine the company has started its mass recruitment, with a couple of hundred people already hired for its Navi Mumbai store.
India is “hugely significant for IKEA globally”, Gohil said, adding that it is seeing the company’s biggest expansion plans among new markets. IKEA is investing €1.5 billion in India.
IKEA India’s larger stores will be spread over an area of more than 45,000 sq m, while the small-format ones will span an area of over 6,500 sq m.
“Mumbai is a significant market for us, one of the top 30 cities globally and our biggest investment in India with warehousing, e-commerce and stores,” Gohil said. The company has set a goal to reach 100 million people in three years.
Key opportunities
In India, IKEA has identified Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru as cities offering potential and opportunities, said Gohil. It is in these cities that IKEA will be eyeing what it calls multiple ‘customer meeting points’, which include a range of touchpoints such as flagship stores, small stores as well as digital touchpoints.
The company also plans to start e-commerce channels for Bengaluru and Delhi soon. It has already started the pilot for e-commerce in Pune.
IKEA started its e-commerce channel for Mumbai in August and this has garnered 2 million visits so far, said Gohil. It has also started e-commerce for Hyderabad, where it opened its only physical store in India in 2018.
For the Indian market, IKEA has introduced 500 products as localisation forms an important strategy in India, Gohil said. The 50-50 diversity agenda — that is, ensuring that 50 per cent of the employees recruited are women — is another focus area for IKEA India, she added.
Accessibility, affordability and sustainability are among its other focus areas in India. There are around 1,000 products available at less than ₹200 apiece in India currently, she said. As for accessibility, India will have some of IKEA’s first small format stores globally, she added.
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