Greek group Fourlis has signed the preliminary contract to buy a plot in Sofia for 12.1 million euro, where it plans to develop the first Ikea hypermarket in the country, investor.bg reported on February 28.

Negotiations for the sale started in November last year, Fourlis officials were quoted as saying, but they declined to give details about its size and location.

The company holds the rights to develop the Swedish furniture chain in Greece and plans to start construction of the Sofia hypermarket later this year. Completion is scheduled for 2009.

Prices in the Bulgarian outlet will be lower than those of its Greek counterpart, because Fourlis' policy was based on the gross domestic product per capita figures of the country it was entering, company representatives noted.

Fourlis intends to open three IKEA outlets in Bulgaria by 2011, two of which will be outside Sofia. It now has two hypermarkets in Greece - one in Athens and one in Thessaloniki. A third store will open in Athens at the end of March and there are plans for building four more units by 2011, one of them again in the Greek capital. The company will also open an outlet in Cyprus.

Fourlis, which also operates the Intersport chain in Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria, intends to increase the total number of its outlets across the four countries to as many as 60 by 2010, Ot now has 35, but only one in Bulgaria, in the Mall of Sofia.

Fourlis' revenue for the 2006/2007 fiscal year exceeded 670 million euro, compared with 482 million euro a year earlier, while pre-tax profit rose to 65.2 million euro from 48 million euro .

IKEA was set up in Sweden in 1943. It now has 260 shops in 34 countries, posting a turnover of 20.7 billion euro in 2007. The registered footfall, which is the number of visitors, for last year was more than 583 million, 60 per cent of them women.