A third branch of Sweden’s famous Ikea furniture store could be set up in southeastern Seoul as early as 2017

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

Ikea wants third store to be in Seoul

Jan 07,2014

A third branch of Sweden’s famous Ikea furniture store could be set up in southeastern Seoul as early as 2017.
Ikea’s first two Korean stores are scheduled to open in Gyeonggi in the second half of this year and in two to three years. According to the Gangdong District government yesterday, Ikea has expressed its intention to buy 13,000 square meters (3.21 acres) of land in Godeuk commercial zone, southeastern Seoul.
The local government is still negotiating with the Swedish company. Even if the local government inks an agreement with Ikea in the first half of this year, final approval from the Seoul City government is required. Ikea announced it would enter the Korean market in late 2011.
After a six-month negotiation with the local government of Gwangmyeong in western Gyeonggi, south of the Han River, the Swedish company received approval to open its first branch in August. The first store is scheduled to open in the second half of the year on a 78,000-square-meter plot of land next to the Gwangmyeong KTX station.
Four months after that approval, Ikea Korea announced late last month that it had bought a 51,200-square-meter plot of land in Goyang, Gyeonggi, northwest of the Han River, for its second branch.
This was an unusual move because Ikea usually decides on a second branch in a country after monitoring its first branch for two or three years.
While the first two branches are expected to attract customers in the western part of greater Seoul, the third branch, although smaller in size, is expected to attract customers in the eastern Seoul area, including Bundang.
Local governments such as Gangdong expect Ikea to boost their regional economies.
However, approval from the Seoul government is uncertain because it always worries that retail giants like Ikea could have a negative impact on smaller merchants and furniture businesses.
BY LEE HO-JEONG [ojlee82@joongang.co.kr]

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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