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By Choi Kyong-ae
The antitrust regulator said Monday that it will inspect IKEA Korea to check whether it will be charging consumers more here than it does in other countries.
It plans to provide IKEA Korea's product pricing information to Korean customers early next year to conduct a joint survey with a consumer rights group.
The move comes after the Swedish furniture retailer recently faced consumer complaints in Korea about product prices that are higher than those in other countries.
"We are planning to commission a consumer group to compare IKEA's product prices by country and by sales routes (such as department stores and outlets). After the survey, all the pricing information will be made public as early as February," Jang Duck-jin, head of the Fair Trade Commission's (FTC) consumer policy bureau, told reporters in a lunch meeting held in the administrative center of Sejong City.
The aim of the survey is to provide the right information on the furniture products to be sold by the world's biggest furniture company. The survey outcome does not carry any legally binding force, he said.
To help consumers make a good decision and pressure companies to adjust their prices to reasonable levels, the FTC has provided the pricing details and comparisons of products which are presumed to be priced high in Korea.
Ahead of the opening of its first store next month, IKEA unveiled the prices of about 8,600 products to be available here. In mid November, Korean consumers took issue with IKEA's pricing policies in Korea when they found that some of its products were priced higher or even as much as double the prices elsewhere.
IKEA Korea Sales Manager Andrew Johnson told reporters last week that all the Korean prices were set after the company took logistics costs, exchange rates, customs and value-added taxes into account.
IKEA plans to open its first Korean store in Gwangmyeong, a suburb of Seoul, on Dec. 18 and four more outlets by 2020. The world's biggest store boasts of total floor space of 59,000 square meters, larger than the current biggest megastores in Sweden and China.
Days after controversy over its pricing, IKEA faced harsh criticisms in Korea as its web site uses the mobile version of Google's map services to give information of store locations. The map refers to the waters to the east of the Korean peninsula as the Sea of Japan. Koreans refer to the waters as the East Sea.
