E.Stetsko / Vedomosti

Yesterday, the Russian chain of Swedish hypermarkets of furniture and home goods IKEA opened online sales of goods for large cities of Siberia and the Far East, the company reported. Currently, the IKEA online store operates for Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Abakan, Ulan-Ude, Chita, Kemerovo, Barnaul, Novokuznetsk, Yurga and other cities, as well as nearby villages.

The easternmost stationary IKEA hypermarket is in Novosibirsk - from there, delivery to new cities will be carried out by partner logistics companies, says Maria Tikhonova, a representative of the Russian division of IKEA. She declined to disclose investments in expanding online sales in Russia. For now, the share of IKEA's online revenue is still small, but expanding the project in Siberia and the Far East could change the situation, says a representative of the retailer.

Sales in Siberia via the Internet will allow IKEA to test the market in those cities where it currently does not have hypermarkets, notes Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline. According to his calculations, in the next two years, online sales in Siberia and the Far East can bring in about half the turnover of one offline store - more than 3 billion rubles.

There are 14 IKEA stores in Russia. Since 2013, the retailer has been testing the online store format: the first online hypermarket opened in Omsk, then in two dozen other cities, including Nizhnevartovsk, Khanty-Mansiysk, and Tyumen. "We are working out a mechanism to take this experience into account when launching online sales in more significant markets, where the population density and our sales are higher," Tikhonova added. When asked when IKEA would launch the project in the European part of Russia, where the majority of the chain's hypermarkets are concentrated, she replied: "IKEA will launch larger-scale online sales in Russia in 2016."

In 2014, IKEA announced a major plan to renovate and develop its shopping centers, but there are no immediate plans to open hypermarkets east of Novosibirsk, Tikhonova says. For now, the company will focus on the European part of Russia.

In the 2014 financial year, Russia accounted for about 6% of all sales of the Swedish concern. Russia is one of the main markets for IKEA. The Swedish company sells more only in Germany (14% of the group's sales), the USA (12%) and France (8%).

According to data provided by IKEA, the chain's revenue in Russia in 2014 was about 87 billion rubles - 14% more than the year before. Here the company was planning to double sales by 2020, said the CEO of the Russian division of IKEA, Walter Kadnar, at the beginning of 2014.

IKEA has reached Vladivostok