Swedish retailer Ikea draws a crowd as it opens its first store in India.
Ikea spent 12 years studying India and visited 1,000 homes in major cities to see how its people lived. Thursday, as a few dozen early shoppers walked through the doors in Hyderabad, the acid test began of whether the furniture giant understands what Indian consumers want.
“I have no plans to blow a lot of money today, maybe just buy some kitchenware, but this is going to be a destination for me,” said Rajani Venugopal, a businesswoman who waited about an hour and managed to be the first person in the doors.
Some 380 million Indians, a population bigger than the entire U.S., will join the middle class in the seven years through 2022. Ikea’s 400,000-squarefoot Hyderabad store is the first step in the retailer’s plans for India, with more outlets scheduled to debut in Mumbai, Bengaluru and the New Delhi area soon after.
“Ikea has an opportunity to pioneer modern retailing in the home improvement
sector,” said Ankur Bisen, head of retail and consumer division at Technopak Advisors Pvt., an Indian consulting firm near New Delhi.
India’s 1.3 billion people spend about $30 billion a year on furniture and household items like bed linens and cookware, but 95 percent of those items are sold by small shops.
What started as a trickle of shoppers at 10 a.m., when the store opened, had turned into a steady stream about an hour later.
Ikea expects as many as 6 million visitors annually at the store in the Hyderabad suburb of Hitec City.
Tweaks to the retailer’s model appear at its 1,000seat cafeteria, where half the menu items, including samosa and seasoned biryani rice, are Indian favorites. Ikea’s iconic Swedish meatballs are made of chicken or vegetables, to meet Hindu strictures against eating beef.
“Food is the entry point,” said store manager John Achillea.