mktg brainlog

IKEA Russia: a success story

• Posted by Kati on March 2nd, 2004 filed in Everything else

Interesting article about IKEA’s Russian expansion with surprising stats:
Ikea: Retailer finds opportunity in Russian market
“According to Lennart Dahlgren, general manager of Ikea Russia, the firm budgeted for sales of $30m in 2000. They hit $100m, and shot up by a further 30% last year. With 4.5m visitors annually, the first Moscow store has more customers than any other Ikea store in the world.”

When IKEA first appeared in Hungary in 1990 they positioned themselves much higher than in other countries. They were not the cheap young furniture store, but the good-quality, “western” furniture store that was a godsend to Hungarian consumers who were longing for better furniture but were only served a very weak supply of cheapo retro-design and poor-quality furniture in the 80s. IKEA was able to leverage that image and their “Western” status for a couple of years. Nowadays, when Hungarian society - and especially young people - are almost fully up-to-speed with their Western European counterparts, IKEA is back to their international image of affordable good design and quality.