IKEA will open a new store in a major city centre next year as it continues its focus on high street locations.

The shop in Churchill Square, Brighton, will replace the former Debenhams store which has been empty since 2021, when the high street giant fell into administration.

1

Ikea has moved away from big warehouse stores in recent years and is now eyeing up smaller sites.

It already has a smaller store in Hammersmith, London, and has unveiled plans for a shop on Oxford Street, which will replace Topshop’s flagship store.

The Swedish giant has not yet confirmed the exact date when the Brighton store will open but has said it will be in 2025.

But it revealed to the Sun that it will be after the Oxford Street location has opened its doors next spring.

The launch of the Oxford Street store has been pushed back several times during the renovation of the seven-floor building.

The Churchill Square Ikea will be the homeware retailer’s 23rd store in the UK.

Plans for the site were revealed last year, to the excitement of shoppers.

It will stock a wide array of the brand’s most popular products, including 6,000 items on display and 3,000 available for immediate purchase.

Staff will be on hand to help customers plan a new kitchen, bedroom or bathroom installation.

The full Ikea range will be available for delivery.

There will also be a Swedish Deli where customers will be able to tuck into the retailer’s iconic meatballs.

The store will also have on-site parking and electric vehicle charging points.

It will be accessible by bus or using a cycle lane.

Ikea’s first city centre shop opened in Tottenham Court Road, London, in October 2018.

Although it closed in July 2021, the homeware brand has continued to focus on the high street.

In its company report Peter Jelkeby, chief executive and chief sustainability officer at Ikea UK, said: “We continue to dedicate our energy to our UK expansion plans.

“We are laser-focused on continuing to innovate to reach more customers, with a network of new, smaller stores that offer different experiences.” 

He added that the stores will also include “new services that meet all of our customers’ needs, no matter where they live”.

The report also revealed that Ikea sales slumped by 2.4% last year, which the retailer said was due to its decision to prioritise affordability by lowering prices.

The cost of almost 3,000 products were slashed last year, offering customers an average price reduction of around 19%.

Among the items to see their prices cut were the Malm chest of three drawers and Ikea 365+ frying pan.

Where is my closest Ikea?

A quick way of figuring out if you have an Ikea store near you is by using the retailer’s locator tool on its website.

You just have to enter the town or city where you live, or your postcode and it will pull up the nearest site.

The same page has a helpful map showing where all of the 21 current stores are located.

Below we reveal the full list of Ikea stores in the UK:

• Croydon
• Hammersmith
• Greenwich
• Lakeside
• Wembley
• Birmingham (Wednesbury)
• Nottingham
• Bristol
• Cardiff
• Exeter
• Belfast
• Manchester
• Warrington
• Edinburgh
• Gateshead
• Glasgow
• Leeds
• Sheffield
• Milton Keynes
• Reading
• Southampton

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

Uber (UBER) shares ticked higher on Friday after Tesla’s (TSLA) robotaxi event left investors largely disappointed. GLOBALT Investments senior portfolio manager Thomas Martin joins Market Domination Overtime to discuss the competition between the two and why Uber benefitted from the event.

“Both Tesla stock and Uber reacted the way you would have expected given the robo-day from Tesla. It was a classic example of long-term versus short-term. And they were the opposite for Uber and for Tesla,” Martin says of the movement.

He tells Yahoo Finance that “if Tesla was able to solve automated vehicles and robo in the near term or you saw a roadmap for even the intermediate term, then that was a problem potentially for Uber longer term. But the devil is in the details.”

As investors were left looking for more insight and further information about the robotaxi rollout, Uber became more attractive to investors. If Tesla cannot meet expected timelines for the release of its robotaxis, Uber will, therefore, have more time to get ahead of the game.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination Overtime here.

This post was written by Melanie Riehl

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Tesla shares closed down almost 9 per cent on Friday, wiping $67bn from the carmaker’s market valuation, after Elon Musk’s much-hyped Robotaxi event disappointed investors with a lack of detail about a planned fleet of autonomous “Cybercabs”.

The plunge in the stock left Tesla as the worst performer on the S&P 500. However, the group remains the most valuable car company in the world, with a market capitalisation of $696bn.

Musk, the world’s richest man, promised the new two-seated vehicle — without a steering wheel or pedals — would be available for less than $30,000 and be in production by the end of 2026, if it secures regulatory approval.

But he did not provide details on the technology behind the robotaxis, nor on how he would bring down the cost of the self-driving vehicles.

“We found Tesla’s Robotaxi event to be underwhelming and stunningly absent on detail,” said Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi. Information about “new products, offerings, and timeframes were absent, and product introductions were largely consistent with expectations”, he added.

At the glitzy “We, Robot” event at Warner Bros Studios in Los Angeles on Thursday, Musk also unveiled a prototype for a 20-person Robovan and predicted that his group’s artificial intelligence-powered Optimus humanoid robot “buddies” would be “the biggest product ever of any kind” and cost less than $30,000.

But the unveiling focused more on design, branding and Musk’s idiosyncratic vision of the future and less on the technology advances needed for Tesla to achieve it.

Following months of delay, Musk’s presentation started nearly an hour late and ended in less than 30 minutes, with Optimus robots dancing in glass gazebos and serving beer to investors.

While the robots moved with more fluidity than previous models, analysts at Morgan Stanley said they remained under human control. “It is our understanding that these robots were not operating entirely autonomously, but relied on tele-ops [human intervention] so it was more a demonstration of degrees of freedom and agility,” they said.

Jefferies analyst John Colantuoni described the event as “toothless” and predicted rivals such as Uber — which recently announced a partnership with Google’s self driving car unit, Waymo — would benefit as a result.

He added that “Tesla did not provide verifiable evidence of progress” towards the required technology, “which makes it difficult to assess feasibility of the targets outlined at the event”.

Uber stock rose 9 per cent on Friday, while rival ride-hailing app Lyft climbed 10 per cent.

Musk has said Tesla’s pivot to autonomous driving and AI could take its valuation as high as $5tn, about seven times its current market value. The group’s shares had risen 45 per cent in anticipation of the unveiling since it announced the “robotaxi day” on April 5.

But the Tesla chief has repeatedly missed targets to roll out self-driving taxis. He first promised fully autonomous rides from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017. In 2019, he predicted that 1mn robotaxis would be on the road by the following year.

Another disappointment for investors was Musk’s failure to unveil a more affordable electric vehicle, known unofficially as the Model 2, which will be priced at $25,000, to revive its ageing product portfolio.