Inditex opens 3,000 th store

Spanish retailer Inditex opens its 3,000 th store today. It achieves the milestone with a Zara Home format store in downtown Valencia . The group, which counts Zara, Berschka, Pull and Bear and Massimo Dutti among its stable of eight brands, has grown explosively in recent years. It has opened 1,000 stores since the launch of its 2,000 th store in Hong Kong in May 2004. In 2005, net sales reached €6.741 billion, with a market capitalization exceeding €23 billion.

Inditex focuses on opening its stores in prime locations in major cities and pays as much attention to the architecture as the fashion assortment. Prime examples are its stores in the Marmorhaus lounge in Berlin , the Haas Haus in Vienna and on the rue de Rennes in Paris . With the group’s stores acting as an “image toolâ€? for the company, window displays play a major role. “Each format changes the windows of all its stores every fortnight during the season, with two additional window displays during the summer and winter sales periods,â€? the group said.

Inditex now has stores in more than 400 cities in 64 countries. “If we were to join the 3,000 Inditex stores, they would take up the two pavements of Broadway, throughout its 25 kms from top to end in Manhattan ,� boasted the company.

The group plans to continue expanding mainly in Europe – which accounts for 80 percent of total turnover – while introducing its other formats where its top-performer Zara is already present, including Norway and Serbia , Italy and Greece and Poland and Lithuania . It expects growth of its younger formats to be “significantâ€?. Asia-Pacific is the group’s second most important market. Last week the company announced its expansion progress in the Far East . Massimo Dutti just opened its first store in Indonesia , while Pull and Bear just opened its first two stores in Singapore . Zara and Massimo Dutti already have stores in the city state. The group now counts more than fifty stores in the region, having launched twenty outlets in six Asian countries in 2006. Zara has opened more than 90 new stores worldwide in the current fiscal year, Berschka launched more than 40, Oysho with more than 30 and Kiddy’s Class, Pull and Bear, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius and Zara Home with more than 20 stores each.