IKEA seeks 450 acres at Kandla port cluster

The Dollar Business Bureau

IKEA the Swedish furniture maker has expressed interest in India’s burgeoning infrastructural growth. The company has shown interest in a planned cluster at Kandla Port and wants to be allotted 450 acres in it. This was revealed to the media by Nitin Gadkari, Minister for Road Transport and Highways and Shipping. Speaking at the launch of a report by TCI-IIM Calcutta on freight transportation by road in India, the Minister said that the company has planned clusters for furniture production at the Kandla port and seeks 450 acres of land near the port. Gadkari said that the furniture maker would give technology, expertise and know-how to the proposed cluster and also purchase the finished products.

“IKEA is ready to buy the finished products. The supplier needs to procure the material needed for the design, turn it into good patterned products and IKEA would purchase them.” The same process is being followed in China, he added. 

“IKEA will procure from the cluster for both domestic as well as global supplies,” he said. Since the procurement of material is local, the cost of products will come down by 50 percent, once the deal is completed. This will, in the long run, give room for India to compete with China in the category of finished designed goods, he added.

The minister added that IKEA is looking at various sites in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru, and Mumbai to open its stores. It is scheduled to open its first store in Hyderabad in the second half of next year and 25 retail stores by 2025 in nine Indian states, as it has received the government’s assent in 2013 for its Rs.10,500 crore proposal to open stores under 100 percent FDI. 

The minister also said that compared to China where for the past 15 years it has opened only 3 stores a year, IKEA seeks much faster growth in India and hopes to do so.