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IKEA Celebrates 1st Bumper Year in Korea
Gyeonggi , Korea: IKEA Korea
retail manager Andre Schmidtgall told
reporters during the first anniversary
of the first IKEA store on the southern
outskirts of Seoul that the Swedish
furniture giant will open five more
stores in Korea by 2020. Reported
by The Chosun Ilbo Co, he said the
decision was prompted by its betterthan-
expected performance. The store
in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi Province
is IKEA’s second largest in the world.
Some 6.7 million customers visited
over the past year and sales reached
W308 billion (USD1=W1,179). “Korea is
a great market with huge potential, with
a growing customer interest in home
furnishing,” Schmidtgall said.
IKEA plans to invest W1.2 trillion by
2020 to open the five additional stores
in Goyang north of Seoul, Gangdong in
the eastern part of the capital, as well as
Daejeon and Busan. The new stores are expected to create 3,500 jobs. The store
in Gwangmyeong employs 913 Korean
workers.The next store will open in
Goyang in 2017 on an even bigger scale.
Schmidtgall played down concerns that
IKEA harms regional businesses. “The
actual numbers do not show that,” he
said. The Korea Distribution Association
analyzed credit card transactions from
December 2014 to August this year and
found that revenues at stores within a 10
km radius of the IKEA Gwangmyeong
store in fact rose between 7.5 and 27.4
percent. Schmidtgall pointed out that
the Gwangmyeong store is the only
IKEA outlet in the world to offer part of
its underground floor space to small
businesses.
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