Business     

IKEA opens second store in Beijing

China.org.cn, November 7, 2013

• IKEA staff members line up and clap their hands to welcome IKEA Xihongmen store's first batch of customers on Thursday morning in Beijing. [Photo / Chen Boyuan / China.org.cn]

  Swedish furniture retailer IKEA opened its second store in Beijing on Thursday, in a bid to profit from its popularity among young people in the Chinese capital.

  The IKEA Xihongmen store is the furnishing giant's 14th store in China, after its debut in 1998 when it opened its first outlet in Shanghai. IKEA has extended its presence to 44 countries with 350 stores so far, said Fredrik Johansson, manager of IKEA's new Beijing store, at the opening ceremony.

  IKEA chose Beijing's Xihongmen area, in the relatively underdeveloped Daxing District, for its second store. The first IKEA store in Beijing, now sits by the northeast corner of the north 4th ring road, after relocating from a smaller north 3rd ring road.

  "After providing furnishing solutions for people living in the north part of the city, we have now opened a store in the south part of the city to fulfill our vision of 'giving people a better everyday life'," said Ms. Zhu Changlai, IKEA China retail manager.

  The IKEA Xihongmen store will mainly target the customers in the south and west of Beijing, a large percentage of which are young people and newcomers to the Chinese capital, since housing prices in these areas used to be below the average for the city.

  Fredrik Johansson said the store had a different tailor-made layout to make it more relevant to people living in south Beijing. More than 9,000 articles are on sale in the new store.

  The new store is expected to attract the customers that have already overloaded IKEA's first Beijing store. The first store has reportedly extended its open hours to 11 pm, one hour later than earlier, to make it more available to office workers.

  Previous reports said that in the summer, Beijing customers rushed to IKEA for an afternoon nap, sleeping on the display mattresses and enjoying the free air-conditioning, a phenomenon rarely seen in other countries.

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