Every day at 8.30 am, Sulekha Bharti steps out of her house in Keshopur Sarpataha in Sant Ravidas Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh (UP), and hails an auto-rickshaw for the half-an-hour, four kilometre drive to the IKEA workshop in Gyanpur, a small town near Varanasi. The day I meet her, she is wearing a bright red sari, her long hair tied neatly in a bun. She is one of the hundreds of women in UP who, for the past three years, have been making textile products for the Swedish home furnishing giant.
IKEA, which grossed 28.7 billion euros in sales in FY14, sells ready-to-assemble furniture, appliances, kitchenware and household goods in 46 countries, with its largest markets in Germany, the US and France. Though it doesn’t have a presence in India yet, it has been sourcing products from the country for the past 28 years. In 2014, it procured 315 million euros worth of goods from 48 Indian suppliers; it wants to increase this to 630 million euros by 2020. For now, the goods sourced are mostly textiles, but the Swedish giant is planning to expand the scope and sourcing model, even as it is laying the groundwork for an India store by 2018.
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