After making Hyderabad its home, Swedish home furnishing retailer Ikea will launch e-commerce operations from Mumbai, where its new is getting ready. This will be followed up by launching online sales in Hyderabad and Pune as well, said Ikea India Chief Executive Officer Peter Betzel.
Addressing the media here to mark the first anniversary of Hyderabad operations, he said the store has seen four million footfalls in the last one year. It has seen about one million purchases made. The Hyderabad store employs 820 people directly and double that number indirectly.
“We are normally attractive for the fun day out for the whole family. We know that on an average 3 to 4 people as a family are visiting our store. So you can say then it is more than 1 million buyers,” he said.
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Ikea had earlier said it invested over Rs 800 crore in the Hyderabad outlet, which includes an in-house 1000-seater restaurant.
On the breakeven of the Hyderabad store, Betzel said they were looking at the long term commencement to India and not predicting when the operations will become profitable. “India is a long term commitment for Ikea and will focus on fast expansion with a multichannel approach. In the coming years, our goal is to meet 100 million customers with our home furnishing offer to make everyday life at home better and brighter,” he said without elaborating further on the time lines.
On the upcoming Mumbai store, he said the construction work was going on there. Since it will also support e-commerce operations, the store will have additional infrastructure to handle logistics, he said.
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The company was looking at various channels including smaller formats and customer meeting points to reach customers. The Chief executive said, “We are in transformation. We are now looking at real accessibility with online stores and different store formats. So, we will have many more product meeting places with different formats, not stores only, but online and meeting places in the cities with big stores formats. The world is changing and we have to adapt to that.”
Ikea had earlier said the Hyderabad store was the first of 25 such outlets planned to be set up in India by 2025. In 2013, IKEA received nod from the government to invest Rs 10,500 crore in single-brand retail.
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