IKEA Hyderabad Store Attracted 40000 Customers on Its Opening Day

Guwahati: On Thursday evening, the IKEA store Hyderabad had witnessed a magnificent crowd, sprawled over the 400,000 sq.ft store, on its opening day. The world's largest Swedish home furnishings retailer IKEA has attracted an approximate of 40000 customers on its first day. This is IKEA's first store in India. It has been worlds largest furniture retailer since 2008.

Following this, store manager John Achillea said that a huge crowd from across the city thronging the store visited that evening. The IKEA staffs found it a bit challenging to regulate the entry and few tense moments were also witnessed when people tried to break queues. The store was accommodated with 9000 customers at a time, which resulted in long waiting queues.

Even though IKEA had a capacity for more 1,200 cars, but a complete chaos on traffic piled up outside the store, as most of the customers were found to park their vehicles in the street, in a hurry to enter inside the store at the earliest.

The company is known for its modern designs for various types of home decors, appliances and furniture. Its interior work is often associated with an eco-friendly simplicity.

The IKEA Hyderabad store is offering 7,500 products, including 1,000 products priced below Rs 200. It also has a 1,000-seater restaurant, which is the biggest for IKEA in its global network, offering Swedish and Indian cuisine. The sprawling store has come up in the heart of Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy City (HITEC), where the majority of the customers were techies.

It took almost five years for the government to approve its set up in India since 2013, with an investment of Rs 1000 crore. IKEA now is planning to invest Rs. 10,500 crore more in order to set up 25 added stores in India by 2025. Their next store will be opened in Navi Mumbai in 2019, followed by Bengaluru and Delhi. In the next phase, IKEA would cover Ahmedabad, Surat, Pune, Chennai, and Kolkata.