IKEA’s Baoshan store is the biggest location in the portfolio (Image: IKEA)
IKEA’s parent company has put eight of the Swedish houseware retailer’s mainland stores on the market as the company reduces its China footprint in the face of the country’s ongoing housing slump and declining sales.
Ingka Group has appointed JLL to market shuttered IKEA stores in the first tier cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, with properties in Tianjin, Harbin, Nantong, Xuzhou, Guiyang and Ningbo also included in the offering, the property consultancy said on its official WeChat account last week.
The sale effort comes as IKEA China revenues slid to RMB 11.15 billion ($1.6 billion) in 2024, dipping nearly 30 percent from their 2019 peak of RMB 15.8 billion, according to company statements. The decline in the Swedish giant’s sales of beds, bookcases and bathroom sets parallels a more than 50 percent drop in China’s market for new homes, which fell from RMB 16.3 trillion in 2021 to RMB 7.3 trillion last year, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
“We will shift our strategy from broad-scale expansion to targeted, in-depth market cultivation, with Beijing and Shenzhen as key pilot markets,” IKEA said in a statement in February. “We will also further ramp up our online business footprint and invest in our existing physical stores to deliver a better shopping experience for customers and a better working environment for our employees.”
Ready-to-Sell Assets
The portfolio spans approximately 498,000 square meters (5.4 million square feet) of floor area, with seven of the stores offered for sale were closed in February, a move the retailer described as “a store network optimisation.” The property in Guyang, the capital of Guizhou province, closed in 2022.
IKEA China CEO Pontus Erntell is shrinking the company’s mainland footprint (Image: IKEA)
The vacant assets have no lease restrictions or ownership disputes, JLL said, and offer the potential for conversion into rental housing, community retail, cultural and tourism projects or corporate headquarters, it added.
“Spanning first-tier core cities, provincial capitals and key gateway cities, these assets form a high-value portfolio,” said JLL. The consultancy declined to disclose asking prices for the assets.
IKEA’s former location in Shanghai’s Baoshan district is the largest asset in the portfolio, measuring 105,000 square metres of gross floor area across a four-storey main building. Located five-minutes’ walk from the Dachang Town metro station on line 7 in northwestern Shanghai, the property was IKEA’s largest store in Asia when it opened in 2013.
The world’s largest furniture retailer still has three stores in Shanghai, including a location in Shanghai Livat, an Ingka-developed shopping mall in Changning district, which opened in 2024 at a cost of over RMB 8 billion ($1.1 billion) and ranked as the group’s largest investment in China.
Across the country, IKEA has 35 locations, including 32 stores, two design and order centres, and one experience centre, according to its website.
Going Smaller
Ingka Group is seeking to offload the assets as China’s retail sales grew only 1.3 percent in the first half of 2026, the lowest rate since Covid-19 restrictions were lifted in late 2022, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics last week.
Ikea said in February that China would continue to be one of its “most important and strategic markets” and that it would roll out ten smaller stores centred around Beijing and Shenzhen over the next two years.
According to the company’s most recent financial statements, China accounted for 3.5 percent of Ingka Group’s global sales in 2025, down from 6.0 percent in 2018. Ingka Group reported euros 410 million ($468 million) in pre-tax losses on its China business in 2025, widening from a euros 270 million shortfall a year earlier.
The company’s new China stores include a 2,055 square metre location in Dongguan in Guangdong province which opened in February and a 1,500 square metre location in Beijing’s Tongzhou district opened in April, both operated in leased premises.
Last December, IKEA’s sister firm Ingka Centres formed a partnership with GoHigh Capital through which a real estate fund managed by the investment firm would buy stakes in three of Ingka’s Livat shopping malls in Beijing, Wuxi, and Wuhan. Ingka Centres continues to manage and operate the malls under the Livat brand after the transaction.
Records filed with the government in February revealed that investors including Hong Kong-based AIA, mainland China’s Taikang Life, Canada’s ManuLife and US insurer MetLife invested in the GoHigh fund.