Beijng, China, April 10, 2006--Sweden's IKEA, the world's largest furniture retailer, said on Monday that it planned to open another seven stores in China over the next three to four years, bringing its total number of stores there to ten.
"This phase of our development will take us up to ten stores over the next three to four years," Ian Duffy, IKEA's president for Asia-Pacific, told Reuters on the sidelines of the opening of a new store in Beijing.
The Beijing store will be the retailer's second-largest worldwide, smaller only than its flagship store in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. IKEA now operates three stores in mainland China.
IKEA will open its first store in Japan later this month after leaving the world's second largest-retail market 20 years ago. But this time, IKEA will operate its own stores in Japan, rather than with a local partner as it did between 1974 and 1986.
Duffy said that the rate of growth of its stores in Japan would also average about two new stores a year.
"It is a fairly big acceleration in the Asia region," Duffy said.
IKEA opened its first store in China in Shanghai in 1998.
