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

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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.