Cyprus Ikea

Oh Em Geeeeee (oh my God in other words) how excited am I?  Very – quite simply very.  And why?  Well, Ikea is coming to Cyprus.  As I recall I was hunting round the internet for some news about the development of the retail market in Bulgaria (yawn, stretch) for an article I was writing and I came across something about Ikea planning a store in Sofia.

The article in question mentioned that a Greek company called Fourlis Group was the driving force behind the store and that they were also in the process of developing a Cyprus Ikea store too…

So I took it upon myself to hunt down these Fourlis folks and my Greek being pretty limited (to alpha as in the alpha of a security or fund is its out-performance over the return adjusted for risk, with risk measured by beta which is used to calculate interest rates for CAPM and is essentially a measure of the correlation between the value of a security and the market and gamma as in the gamma of a derivative which is the rate of change of its delta with the price of the underlying security…approximately it’s the change in the delta that results from a one unit change in the price of the underlying.) (you have to have worked in an investment bank to be this boring, it’s okay) I emailed them in English hoping that someone with good language skills might just happen upon my request for information and maybe, just maybe put me out of my misery and tell me more.
Dear Sir (I wrote),

I read with interest the following statement on your website (because I did): -

IKEA store in Cyprus (promising title)

Fourlis Group announces that, today 20th of October 2005, its subsidiary
HOUSE MARKET S.A., through an affiliate company that has been
established in Cyprus, signed an agreement for the leasing of a plot of
land in Cyprus, where the IKEA store will be built.

The total investment for the two new IKEA stores, the second store in
Athens and the store in Cyprus, will be EUR 40 mio and the turnover of
HOUSE MARKET S.A. after the opening of the two new stores, will reach
EUR 300 mio, on an annual basis.

The new IKEA store will be 22,000 sq.m. and will begin operations during
first half of 2007.

20 October 2005
Fourlis Holdings S.A.
I.R. Department

Can you please tell me whether the opening of the IKEA store is still on schedule and whether it will be located close to Nicosia or elsewhere in Cyprus. (gotta know how far I’ll have to go after all)

Thank you sincerely for your time.
Rhiannon Williamson (that’s me)

And in reply today I finally got the response I’d been hoping for…

Dear Rhiannon (me again)

Thank you for contacting us.

I would like to confirm that that IKEA store is on schedule and it will be located in Nicosia in the Shacolas retail park.

The opening will be in the second quarter of 2007.

Best regards
George (George, but of course)

So, there we have it – in a nutshell I will quite soon have a house filled with Ikea delights and be spending every waking minute when I’m not working prowling the aisles of Cyprus Ikea with a trolley laden with STUFF.

VERY EXCITING…
Good night all.