IKEA Opens First India Store, Stampede-Like Scene On Opening Day [Photos, Videos]

Swedish furniture giant IKEA opened its first Indian mega store to a stampede-like crowd in Hyderabad, Telangana, on Thursday.

The 400,000 square foot store located at the heart of the Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy City (HITEC) opened to a horde of people at 10 a.m. local time (12.30 p.m. EDT).

Around 40,000 people visited the 13-acre store on its first day. By 4 p.m. (6.30 am EDT), over 10,000 people had visited the store. Reports said the crowds grew exponentially in size in the later part of the day as thousands of techies visited the store after work hours. Hyderabad has the highest amount of software professionals in Telangana.

“With a huge crowd from across the city thronging the store in the evening, the IKEA staff found it a bit challenging to regulate the entry. There were also a few tense moments when some people tried breaking queues,” store manager John Achillea said.

The crowds caused a traffic jam in front of the store. Store employees, in a move to regulate the customers, allowed entry in batches.

The first customers were welcomed to the store by company officials and other employees who held Indian and Swedish flags, while a band played music in the background.

Social media was abuzz with videos and pictures of the stampede-like situation caught on camera.

The restaurant in the store can accommodate over 1,000 people inside and provides a variety of low priced Indian and Swedish delicacies for the customers. The store has over 7,000 products spread across two floors. Even before the official opening, the hype behind the store was huge.

IKEA brought down the price of its products to as low as 200 rupees ($2.91) to adapt to the Indian market.

The store will have items on display like a home. In India, most people are not used to self assembled-furniture. To tackle this problem IKEA has set up a 150-strong in-house team to help customers with putting the product together.

“We found love for homes is very big in India. We did not know this. Friends, families, festivals and food all happen at home,” Patrick Antoni, Deputy CEO IKEA India, said. “Unlike countries like China, Taiwan and Korea, people in India celebrate at home and we promise to improve their everyday life.”

IKEA has stores in 49 countries around the world. The store is the first of 25 other outlets IKEA plans to open across India, that has a population of 1.25 billion people, by 2025.

The second store situated in Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, will open next year. This will be followed by stores in Bangalore, Karnataka, and Delhi.

In 2013, the Indian government gave the Swedish brand approval to invest in India. On Wednesday, the company revised the number of stores to 40, and said they planned to approach the government with revised investment plans.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) named India to be the fasted-growing major economy in the world in 2018. The Economist Intelligence Unit put the country’s household furniture market’s worth at $2.7 billion by 2022.