STORES

Ikea ponders further growth in Ireland

28.07.2010

Ikea wants to open further stores in the Irish republic and is currently searching for suitable locations. It opened its first Irish store in Dublin a year ago and has just posted its first results.

It says the Ballymun site generated €15.7m in its first 36 days of trading and attracted some 15,000 shoppers a day for the first few weeks. Ireland, however, has been hard hit in the past couple of years and sales growth for furniture firms has been hard to come by.

Ikea's Dublin store is more than 30,000sqm and employs some 500 staff. It didn't specify particular towns in which it was looking for stores, but the Swedish company has typically had to overcome a number of planning obstacles and objections before gaining the green light. It has 18 further stores in the UK.