IKEA PH To Open In Pasay City
The wildly popular furniture brand is slated to open in the Mall of Asia area. We wonder what its impact will be on the local furniture market.
The Mall of Asia Complex is one of the top places to shop, eat, drink, and watch concerts (and Disney on Ice) in Metro Manila. Now it will soon add one more activity to this list: visiting IKEA. Bloomberg reported last April 6 that SM Prime Holdings, one of the country's top property developers, will be leasing out to property to IKEA within the Mall of Asia Complex in Pasay City (enterpreneur.com.ph).
This doesn't come as a surprise, because the MOA complex is one of the last remaining open spaces in the congested Metro Manila area. And the affordable Swedish furniture brand needs the space--because according to howstuffworks.com, the average size of an IKEA store is approximately 300,000 square feet (27,871 square meters). That's about the footprint of five football fields!
SM Prime Holding's sister company SM Retail currently handles four very popular home furnishing and improvement brands: SM Home, Our Home, Crate & Barrel, and Ace Hardware.
In this article we posted in 2016, Real Living readers stated that they were excited about the imminent opening of IKEA on our shores, although some expressed concern about its impact on small, local furniture businesses. "While I love furniture that have super-efficient, purposeful Scandinavian beauty, I'm afraid that would mean for, and the larger implications on the local furniture and design industry," says reader Belinda Torres.
However, according to this article, IKEA and other "Big Box stores" that come in can actually contribute to the growth of a community by the introduction of new jobs (the mere demand for construction workers for the store is big), and an increased interest in home decorating. In the 2013 study "What Happens When IKEA Comes To Town" by Daunfledt, Mihaescu, Nilsson, and Rudholm, the introduction of IKEA has a "large positive impact on the durable goods trade in the entry municipality."Â Â
Meanwhile, all we have to do now is to sit back and wait for the PH store to open. Looking forward to the Swedish meatballs and Poang chairs very soon!
