The world's largest seller of furniture and household goods, the Swedish IKEA, may open a second 30,000 sq m store in Ukraine in the new shopping and entertainment center Lisovyi on Kyiv's Brovarsky Avenue in early 2020.
The news was announced by Vagif Aliyev, the founder of the Mandarin Plaza Group, at a Kyiv press conference Wednesday.
“I am very glad that I managed to reach an agreement with IKEA on them entering the Ukrainian market. The fact that some people say that it's some wrong IKEA that will enter, since the store will be only 6,000 square meters, is nonsense. After IKEA starts working in Ocean Mall, they will open several stores 30,000 square meters each in Kyiv, and then in other cities of Ukraine. After Ocean Mall, we will open the Lisovyi shopping and entertainment center. IKEA will definitely come there,” he said.
Aliyev noted that in the future, IKEA will also be interested in other malls.
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As UNIAN reported earlier, in July IKEA began recruiting employees for its first store in Ukraine. It is planned that the Swedish trade network in 2019 will open in Ukraine its first store in a new urban format, along with France, the UK, Denmark, the U.S., and China.
The opening of the first IKEA shopping center in Kyiv was planned for the fall of 2006, but then the process was delayed due to problems with the allocation of the relevant land plots. In early September 2007, the CEO of IKEA in Russia and the CIS, Per Kaufman, said that the company was receiving their first land plot near Odesa, but in June 2010 the company announced it would stop searching for land and building in Odesa region.
