However, in the future, IKEA will keep an expansion speed of opening one or two stores each year. |
It is a fairly big acceleration in the Asia region. |
It is only in a store of this size that we can offer what we want to offer and to differentiate ourselves from our competitors in this changing market. |
Roughly one million people are entering the middle class each month and government policies to increase consumption mean this is an ideal time for us to expand in China. The average person living in Beijing can buy four times as much from us as he could when we opened in the capital in 1999. |
The pace of global expansion for the group is increasing. |
This phase of our development will take us up to ten stores over the next three to four years. |
We took a very conscious decision to lower our margins ... but the result has been, of course, we have sold very much higher volumes. |