Inditex

Infobox Company
company_
company_type = Public (ITX)
foundation = 1975
location = A Coruña, Spain
key_people = Amancio Ortega (President)
industry = Retail
products = Clothing
revenue = profit €8.196 billion (2006)
num_employees = 76,000
homepage = http://www.inditex.com

Inditex, Industrias de Diseño Textil, S.A., (BMAD|ES0148396015|ITX), in English, "Textile Design Industries, Inc.", is a large Spanish corporation and one of the world's largest fashion groups. It is made up of almost a hundred companies dealing with activities related to textile design, production and distribution. Amancio Ortega Gaona is the founder and current chairman of Inditex. He is also Spain's richest man.

Inditex runs around 3,600 stores worldwide and owns brands like Zara, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Oysho, Pull and Bear, Zara Home, Often and Stradivarius. Most stores are corporate-owned since franchises are only conceded in countries where corporate properties can not be foreign-owned (in some Middle Eastern countries, for example).

The group designs and manufactures almost everything by itself, and new designs are dispatched twice a week to Zara stores.

Inditex headquarters are located in Arteixo, a village in the province of A Coruña in Galicia, north of Spain. It is there where almost all its merchandises are manufactured. In addition they have another big plant mainly responsible for shoes’ design, production and distribution in Elche, a well-known town of Alicante’s province in the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

History

The first Zara shop opened its doors in 1975 in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), the city which saw the Group's early beginnings and which is now home to its central offices. Today Inditex's shops can be seen in places like New York's Fifth Avenue, Paris' Champs-Élysées, London's Regent Street, Frankfurt's Zeil, Shanghai's Nanjing West Road, Tokyo's Shibuya,Istanbul's Nişantaşı or Seoul's Myeong-dong.

Inditex won the 2006 Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for their innovative and successful implemenation of information technology to drastically decrease the time it takes to get new merchandise from the design stage to the in-store stage.

In early 2008 summer Inditex presents Uterqüe, the new accessories brand of the company, 3 inaugural flagship stores are opened in Madrid (Serrano Street), Barcelona (Passeig de Gràcia) and La Coruña.

Inditex opened in 22nd September 2008 it´s 4000 Zara shop in the shopping district of Ginza in Tokyo, considered one of the most important shopping areas in the world.

Companies of the group

ee also

* European Retail Round Table

External links

* [http://www.inditex.com Official website]
* [http://inditex.com/en/press/press_releases/extend/00000598 Inditex expansion in 2007]