December 30 (SeeNews) - Serbia said on Friday that Swedish home furnishing retailer IKEA plans to invest up to 80 million euro ($84.4 million) in the construction of a retail park in Belgrade.
The retail park will be built adjacent to IKEA's first store in the country, still under construction.
IKEA currently has a staff of 50 in Serbia and in January or February it plans to start hiring a further 250 employees for the operation of the store, Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vucic said during a visit to the construction site in Belgrade, according to a press release posted on the government's website.
The Serbian government is in talks with IKEA for the sale of other land plots in the country, Vucic added.
The Swedish company started the construction of the 70 million euro store in April and plans to launch it in June 2017. The store will cover 35,300 square metres of the 31-hectare land plot acquired by IKEA near the Belgrade-Nis motorway.
In January the government said IKEA plans to invest a total of 300 million euro in its first stores in Serbia. IKEA explained earlier it eventually plans to open two stores in Belgrade and one each in Nis, Novi Sad, and at an unspecified location in central Serbia.
Elsewhere in Southeast Europe (SEE), IKEA is present in Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria. The company aims to have a total of 13 stores in the region by 2025. In addition to Belgrade, it plans to open stores in Ljubljana and Bucharest next year.
($ = 0.948405 euro)