IKEA Portugal will spend €34 million cutting prices across a broad slice of its range during the fiscal year that began on 1 September, and will open a seventh Portuguese store before that year is out. The two announcements, made on Monday 15 September in a statement reported by Jornal Económico, Executive Digest and Distribuição Hoje among others, came six and a half weeks after the Swedish retailer opened its compact-format store in Coimbra and, the company says, drew more than 230,000 visits to it in the first month. The location and opening date of the next store were not disclosed; both, IKEA said, will be announced “shortly”.
The figure that matters for the corridor is the €34 million, because it is the first time a market-level number has been put on Portugal’s share of the price programme that Ingka Group, IKEA’s largest franchisee, unveiled from Leiden on 1 September. That programme commits Ingka, the other IKEA franchisees and brand owner Inter IKEA Group to €1.2 billion of price reductions across Europe from the start of the fiscal year, with average cuts of 15 to 25 percent on products such as the KALLAX shelving, the HEMNES daybed and the POÄNG armchair. In Germany more than 1,500 products were marked down by an average of 20 percent; in the United Kingdom the BILLY bookcase fell 28 percent; in Italy hundreds of items were cut by an average of 22 percent. Ingka’s chief executive Juvencio Maeztu described it as “not an activity or short-term campaign” but a decision to make IKEA “more affordable when people need it most, even if it means accepting a lower margin”.
“Every euro counts”
The Portuguese statement reads the same programme through a local lens. “We know that families in Portugal are today taking harder decisions about where and how to spend their money,” said Erin Shi, acting country retail manager of IKEA Portugal. “The rising cost of living, the pressure on housing and economic instability mean that every euro counts, and make affordability more important than ever. That is precisely why we are investing 34 million euros in lowering the prices of a wide range of products: we want more people to be able to keep a home they are proud of and feel good in, with well-designed, quality solutions, at a price they can afford.”
The money is aimed first at storage and organisation, the category IKEA identifies as the biggest source of frustration in Portuguese homes and the theme of its Store & Organise Report 2026. Kitchens are the other pillar: during fiscal 2026 IKEA sold, on average, more than 100 kitchens a day in Portugal, a run-rate the company expects to strengthen over the coming months. That is a striking number for a market of just over ten million people served by six stores and a handful of planning studios, and it says something about where Portuguese households are putting money in a housing market where moving has become expensive: into the home they already have.
Coimbra’s first month
The expansion promise builds on the Coimbra store, which NorthSouth HQ previewed in June and which opened on 30 July at Mondego Retail Park in Taveiro. At 4,124 square metres and around 34 staff, it was IKEA’s first new Portuguese store since Loulé in 2017 and the first anywhere in the country built on the compact “small but mighty” format; local press put the investment at about €3 million and reported some 650 people queuing on opening day. The 230,000 visits IKEA now reports for the first month suggest the format has found its audience in a region that previously had only a planning studio, opened in 2021, and an hour-plus drive to Matosinhos, Braga, Loures or Alfragide.
The seventh store is being described in the same terms. IKEA says the compact format has been well received and will be complemented by the rest of its Portuguese service network, which is consistent with Maeztu’s line on 1 September that Ingka is “investing to make IKEA more accessible by opening many smaller stores as part of our omnichannel experience”. Where it goes is not yet public. The existing map, Alfragide (2004), Matosinhos (2007), Loures (2010), Braga (2016), Loulé (2017) and Coimbra (2026), leaves obvious gaps between Coimbra and Loures along the A1 corridor and on the south bank of the Tagus, and the compact format lowers the population threshold a site needs to clear; NorthSouth HQ will not guess beyond that.
Buyer and factory
For the Portugal ↔ Scandinavia corridor, IKEA remains the template case of a Swedish group using Portugal in both directions at once. On the demand side it is a retailer cutting prices to defend volume in a market under cost-of-living pressure. On the supply side, IKEA Industry’s plant in Paços de Ferreira, inaugurated in 2008 in the heart of the Capital do Móvel, employs around 1,500 people, turns out some 15 million pieces a year and exports roughly 96 percent of them to about 21 countries. Statistics Sweden’s trade tables, which NorthSouth HQ analyses separately today, show Swedish imports of furniture from Portugal doubling to SEK 244 million in the first half of 2026. Add Ingka Investments’ hybrid wind-and-solar park and the €400 million Ria Stone tableware contract running to 2034, and the group is simultaneously one of Portugal’s larger foreign retailers, industrial exporters, energy investors and procurement customers.
Two things to watch. Ingka normally publishes its full-year results in the autumn, and fiscal 2026 will be the first to show Coimbra’s contribution and the effect of the FY24 price investment that the group credits with lifting visits and orders. And the seventh-store announcement, when it comes, will show whether the compact format is now IKEA’s default for filling in the Portuguese map. Swedish retail, industrial and investment presences in Portugal are tracked in the Swedish Companies in Portugal directory.