Ikea in Indonesia

IKEA in Indonesia

Background

IKEA Company was founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad. The name of IKEA is originally formed from the first letter of the founder’s name and the names of the property and the village where he grew up. At the beginning, IKEA produced and sold simple things (such as pens, wallets, table, pictures frame, watches and jewellery) in the base of low price. The production of furniture in IKEA began during 1947 and in 1955 IKEA Company started to design its own furniture. Based on the company’s motto “Well designed and affordable quality furniture for everybody,” IKEA has been able to grow into fame company

IKEA is known as the biggest furniture company in all over the world. The specialization of IKEA is producing modern and stylish furniture but in inexpensive price. Nowadays, there are about 220 stores of IKEA in 33 countries and most of them are placed in Europe while the rest are in United States, Canada, Australia and Asia.

Despite the modern style and design of the furniture, IKEA has also been known for its easy self-assembly. This means that the products of IKEA are designed to be assembled by the customers themselves rather than being sold pre-assembled.

Although IKEA originally comes from Sweden (produces Swedish style home furniture), the owner of the IKEA concept is a Dutch company, which is k known as Inter IKEA Systems BV. So far, the operator of the majority stores in all over the world is done by the IKEA Group, private companies which are owned by a Dutch foundation. From the total of 220 IKEA stores in 33 countries, about 180 of them are run by the IKEA Group and the remaining stores are run by other operators outside the IKEA Group.

The format of IKEA

IKEA is known as a huge blue box with few windows. The design of IKEA is practically arranged “one-way” line in order to guide the customers to travel nearly all parts of the store before getting into the cashier or the way-out. The order of “one-way” line in IKEA stores involve going through the furniture showrooms first, continue to the house wares of market- hall and then to the place where customers can pick up the flat packs products as seen in the showrooms, then finally to the cashier. In my opinion, with this strategy IKEA has successfully arranged as efficient as possible in order to become representative in the customer’s point of view.

Even though I think that what IKEA has been doing is very good system, some customers feel the disadvantage from the long “one way” line. They are demanding to be able to travel through the store in shorter way in case that the customers have already known what they want to buy. Recently, it has been introduced shortcuts between sections in some IKEA stores, so that customers are able to make the travel in store efficiently.

General Mission of IKEA

The general mission of IKEA is to offer a broad range of home furnishing items with good design and function, good quality and at low prices so that the customers can easily afford the products. The target of the company is customers who is searching for value good in reasonable price and is willing to do extra work such as transporting the items to their own home and assembling the items by themselves.

Come along with that, the success of IKEA has been reached by keeping the manufacturers cost down. This is done by packing the items produced compactly and arranging them in the storage carefully in order to reduce the storage space during and after the distribution process.

Building IKEA in Indonesia

Nowadays, the IKEA concept has proven to be a success in many countries. IKEA, in fact, is one of the biggest store chains that exists in the world. Currently, there are more than 20 stores scheduled to open in several countries during 2006.

In my opinion, Indonesia would also be a perfect place to start IKEA Company.

Indonesia is the largest archipelago country in the world which is located between Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. Indonesia has 17,508 islands, 6,000 of which are inhabited. Nowadays, Indonesia has the total population of more than 200 millions people and is recorded as the fourth most populous country overall. Indonesia, in fact, is a very rich country. We can see it not only from its various natural resources but also from its ethnic groups, languages and religion.

There are more than 3000 local languages are spoken in Indonesia so that this country is known for its lingua franca, but instead of that Indonesia has an official national language (called Bahasa Indonesia) to unite