Ikea opens its first store in India

After planning for more than a decade, Swedish furniture giant Ikea is finally opening its doors in India on Thursday.

Ikea said it expects to welcome as many as 6 million visitors a year at its new 13-acre complex in Hitec City, on the outskirts of Hyderabad, India’s fourth-biggest city.

The new location comes 12 years after the company started researching India as a potential market and six years after it made an announcement to come to the country. Its first showroom will display more than 7,500 of its products, of which 1,000 will sell for less than 200 rupees ($2.91) apiece.

The company also said it plans to open 25 locations by 2025 and start e-commerce operations from Mumbai next year.

Last month, Ikea’s chief executive Peter Betzel said it plans to target Bengaluru, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Chennai markets next.

The push comes as India is poised to overtake the U.S. as the world’s second-largest middle-class market by 2022. According to Euromonitor International, sales of home furnishings are expected reach $15.3 billion by then, up from $12.9 billion last year.

And Ikea isn’t the only one bullish on India. Amazon and China’s Alibaba Group have been battling for market share in the country over the last year.

In April, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma said he believes “that globalization is the future” and plans to continue investing heavily in both India and Australia, which is something Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been doing since 2014.

Bezos has been so determined to win India, a market of 1.3 billion people (mostly millennials, too), because the e-commerce giant’s online retail market share in the country is expected to grow to $200 billion in 2026, from $15 billion in 2016, according to research from Morgan Stanley. Bezos has already poured more than $5.5 billion into the country over the years, which Alibaba later followed with several of its own investments.