IKEA stays open in Indonesia

“The IKEA store at Alam Sutra remains open and is selling the full range of IKEA products,” Hero Supermarket IKEA division director Mark Magee told the press on Friday. 

 

The publicly listed retailer PT Hero Supermarket is the IKEA franchisee in Indonesia as appointed by the IISBV, the owner and world-wide franchisor of the brand. 

 

Magee said the Supreme Court ruling issued last year only invalidates two IKEA trademarks under class 20 and 21 for furniture products, registered in 2006 and 2010, because they were not used in the three-year window post registration with the Intellectual Property Rights Directorate General. 

 

“The Commercial Court of Jakarta and the Supreme Court rulings did not award the IKEA trademark to any other party,” he said. 

 

A local furniture firm, PT Ratania Khatulistiwa, based in Surabaya, East Java, filed a trademark suit with the Jakarta Commercial Court in 2013, stating that the Dutch firm had not used its trademark for commercial purposes for three consecutive years. In 2014, the court ordered that the trademarks be invalidated. 

 

IISBV filed an appeal to the Supreme Court that was rejected last year, according to court documents uploaded to its website recently. 

 

IISBV had reregistered the IKEA trademark in 2012 with a plan to open a store in 2014 following the signing of a franchise agreement with Hero Supermarket.

 

The reregistration process, completed in 2014, covered around 40 classes of trademark, including the disputed class 20 and 21, Magee said. 

 

“Therefore, the court decision has no impact on the current operation of IKEA in Indonesia,” he said. 

 

Hero Supermarket legal director Hadrianus Wahyu Trikusumo said that the IKEA trademarks registration lodged by the local company was currently on hold.

 

“We don’t want to speculate on this,” he replied when asked about the possibility that the government would grant the trademarks and what the implication of such a decision would have on his firm’s business. 

 

Meanwhile, Magee was optimistic about business potential in the country despite the conflicting decisions made by authorities. 

 

The European Business Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia (EUROCHAM) chairman Ulf Backlund voiced similar optimism, saying that his office remained very positive regarding both Indonesian market potential and government and said that the actions taken to protect the trademark were in the right direction. 

 

“From our perspective, of course, intellectual property rights, trademarks and the protection around these are very important for all businesses,” he said, admitting that the matter had drawn global attention. 

 

IKEA, the world’s biggest furniture retailer, founded by Ingvar Kamprad in Sweden in 1943, currently boasts 375 IKEA stores, over 150,000 co-workers in 47 countries, and total sales over 30 billion euros (US$33.77 billion).

 

The company opened for business in Indonesia in 2014 and plans to open two stores every five years until 2025.