With new stores in Thailand and Vietnam, Japan's Nitori competes with Ikea in Asia

On a weekend in September, roughly 70 customers lined up in front of the opening of Japanese furniture manufacturer Nitori's first Thai location in Bangkok's Central World mall. 

There was once a 40-minute wait simply to get in.

As part of Nitori's Asia-focused international expansion, the store opened in late August. According to billionaire Chairman Akio Nitori, this is his best chance yet to continue a more than three-decade-long streak of sales growth.

Nitori said that whoever controls Asia controls the world. He added that they were sending top talent for their store expansion.

This fiscal year, Nitori wants to open 77 locations, more than double the number it did the year before. It currently has outlets in China and Taiwan, and it also intends to open shops in Vietnam and Indonesia, as well as six other new regions. It plans to open more foreign outlets than Japanese ones in the upcoming fiscal year.

The next five years will be critical for their competition with Ikea, according to Nitori.

It would seem impossible for the Japanese store to compete with Ikea, the largest furniture seller in the world. The retail space at the Swedish chain's sites in Japan is on average 23,000 square meters, as opposed to 3,000 square meters for ordinary Nitori stores. Ten times more than Nitori, Ikea aims to serve 1 to 1.5 million local residents.

Nitori has more than twice as many stores in Asia outside of Japan as Ikea, but Ikea's stores are spread out over ten markets as opposed to Nitori's six, and the latter company has a more well-known name internationally.

Masanori Takeda, Nitori's general manager of global merchandizing said that they couldn't match big-box Ikea toe-to-toe. He added that nonetheless, they were meeting consumer needs by filling in Ikea's gaps.