NEW DELHI: Swedish furniture retailer IKEA on Thursday said it is interested in developing its Ingka Centers in India as part of its global expansion stargety.

As part of Ingka Centers global expansion strategy we are interested in developing IKEA-anchored meeting places in India but we are not able to provide more details at this point," the company spokesperson said in response to a query from Mint. Ingka Centres is a division of Ingka Group which owns most IKEA stores worldwide.

Ingka Centres owns 45 shopping centres in China, Europe, and Russia and hosts 480 million visitors each year. These are large shopping centres with IKEA stores as anchor stores. Overseas, some of these centres have over 200 shops including large hypermarkets stores such as Carrefour, apart from fashion brands such as H&M and food stores.

On Thursday, Business Standard reported that the company was looking to set up such centres in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Mumbai, citing sources privy to the retailers India expansion plans.

The news comes as IKEA is looking to build its business across multiple formats--opening large and small stores as well as accelerating sales online.

In India, the retailer has one store in Hyderabad. It also opened up online sales in Pune ahead of a store in the city. The retailer is set to open a store in Navi Mumbai; two small format stores in Mumbai will open in 2021.

In an interview with Mint last year, IKEA India chief executive Peter Betzel, had said the company was adopting an omni-channel" approach as it expands in the country.

We need to be much more accessible to many people, which means adopting a true omni-channel approach. This means the big stores and small formats in the big cities of Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru and then also having an online approach. This is exactly what we need in India. If we look at how many physical meeting places we will have, may be in 8, 10 or 15 years, it would be much more than 25. Whether it will be 25 big stores, I cannot say today, Betzel said.

Ingka Group, the parent company of IKEA has three business including are IKEA Retail, which operates 367 IKEA stores. Ingka Investments, whose main mission is to protect the financial independence of the group, and Ingka Centres.

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IKEA keen to develop shopping centres in India - Mint