Hyderabad to get India’s first IKEA store; creating over 500 jobs

Swedish furniture maker, IKEA held a ground breaking ceremony in Hyderabad on Thursday which will be India’s first IKEA store.

The company stated that the store is set to open in autumn of 2017.

IKEA will hire 500 direct co-workers and another 1500 engaged in providing services around the store. 

“The store will be about 400,000 sq. ft. large and will host more than 5-6 million customers every year. It will feature nearly 7500 well designed, beautiful home furnishing products, a supervised children’s play area for visitors, day care centre for its co-worker’s children, 2000 parking spaces and a 1000 seat restaurant serving Swedish as well as Indian dishes,” the company said in a statement.

IKEA also launched ‘Disha’ which is a skill building project to train a million women employees in the next 10 years who will then be employed by the store.

CEO, Juvencio Maeztu said, “This is a big milestone for us today and all of us are very proud that the first IKEA store in India seems very close to reality now! India is a very important market for IKEA and with Hyderabad, we find a perfect match with cities’ young, dynamic demographics, culture, values and history.”

She further added, “We have committed to hire 50% women in our workforce and we look forward to a big participation from the society.”

The store will engage with the local community by creating job opportunities and work with social entrepreneurs as part of Next Generation projects.