IKEA Wuhan Poly Shopping Center Opens In Late April

Is it always enough to visit IKEA?

Go straight along the planned route, go through the exhibition rooms, furniture shelves, until the payment desk, at most, eat a Nordic fast food in a crowded restaurant, or buy a hot dog. If you can go shopping, watch a movie or eat a big meal, maybe this "IKEA shopping trip" is complete enough.

In fact, IKEA is trying to meet this demand.

In June 2014, a family called "gather together". Shopping Mall The mall opened in Wuxi. In the shopping center with a rental area of 151 thousand square meters.

In addition to the Wuxi IKEA home as the main store, it also has Auchan supermarket, Suning Appliance, Jinyi Movie City, and most of the fast fashion brands you can think of. About 20% of the total number of restaurants is concentrated in the 4 and 5 floors. Unlike the common shopping centers in China, it has a huge parking lot with 4500 parking spaces.

6 months later, another large scale shopping mall was opened in Beijing. It was similar to Wuxi in the layout of its business format. It put Beijing Xihongmen IKEA into its own box, but the parking space reached 6500.

By the end of April this year, Wuhan will also open.

Does IKEA want to transform itself? Shopping Mall What's so special about the practice of shopping mall and IKEA? In the ninth issue of 2015 magazine, we brought the story of the brand of the new shopping center.

In appearance, you may not be able to see that there is too much contact between the mall and IKEA. It has a completely different name, and the theme color is red. Compared with IKEA's full use of every corner of the compact layout shop design, gathering in the building space is more likely to provide transparent lighting, spacious aisles and streamlined moving lines.

But the developers behind the gathering are still IKEA themselves.

The developer and operator of the gathering is the Intel IKEA shopping center group. It was a joint venture between Intel IKEA group and IKEA group in 2001. They are both companies under the name of Ingvar Kamprad. Among them, Intel IKEA group holds 51% of the IKEA shopping center group.

"Don't mistake this as a story about IKEA home transformation as a shopping mall." Ding Hui, managing director of Intel IKEA shopping center, China, explains.

In Europe, the IKEA shopping center group is already a mature shopping center developer. It operates 45 shopping centers in 10 countries and regions, including Germany, Poland and France. They are usually located in the suburbs with convenient transportation. They have huge parking lots, complete brands, and can solve the one-stop consumption demand. These shopping centres developed and managed by Intel IKEA have different names all over the world, but the most obvious common feature is that they have a IKEA home store in the shopping center.

And agglomeration is their version in China.

In 2008, the Intel IKEA shopping center group (hereinafter referred to as "Intel IKEA") decided to enter China, hoping to copy their successful models in Europe to China.

The task of finding suitable land was initially co operated with IKEA China. Ding Hui, chief financial officer of China IKEA and general manager of shared service center, was named by John Tegn R, chief executive of Intel IKEA shopping center, and invited him to become the head of Intel IKEA shopping center group in China.

As the new head of the Chinese region, Ding Hui's team originally had only 9 people, apart from the legal and personnel director from IKEA China, and the director of investment, engineering director, design director and general manager of IKEA from Europe.

Ding Hui has an investment budget of 10 billion yuan, and a mature shopping center product in Europe. He needs to conduct a test at different levels of China's market to see what opportunities IKEA can survive in China under different urban capacity, population and per capita income.

All started with the successful experience of IKEA in Europe.

The accessibility of vehicle traffic is one of the key considerations of IKEA's site selection. "European residents usually live rather scattered, and everyone has a car, so the location of IKEA shopping center will be close to the expressway, the loop line, and close to the entrance, which are places that can be easily driven." Ding Hui said.

He believes that the trend of China's vehicle ownership increases and urban expansion is similar to that of Europe. "If you want to go out shopping or meet with friends, you may have a great chance of driving, and the direction from downtown to suburb is usually not so crowded."

In fact, IKEA is also a home grown with automobile culture. brand 。 In 1950s, it introduced the flat panel packaging for furniture. These reassembled furniture can be easily loaded into the trunk of the car. Driving to IKEA is also the most convenient mode of transportation.

According to IKEA's European Shopping Center product positioning, in 2009, Ding Hui and his new team selected three land in Wuxi, Beijing and Wuhan, all located in the suburbs, enough to build a shopping center with a total body volume of about 300 thousand square meters.

The idea of design is also consistent with their experience in Europe. The zenith of the shopping center is a well lit glass cover, while there are spacious public spaces and aisles, and the overall color will be relatively rich.