IKEA to "invest significantly" in its smart home future

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Recently, IKEA teamed up with Sonos to launch a pair of smart home products – the Symfonisk lamp speaker and Symfonisk bookshelf speaker – but the Swedish furniture giant isn’t going to stop there.

In a public announcement, IKEA has revealed that its smart home division (called Home Smart) is formally becoming “its own business unit within Ikea of Sweden”, and that the company “decided to invest significantly in Home Smart across IKEA to fast-forward the development”.

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While IKEA’s business structure is somewhat nebulous, this announcement essentially amounts to an explicit commitment to continuing to develop products in the smart home category.

In fact, considering the aforementioned products that IKEA and Sonos collaborated on are part of the Symfonisk range, it’s very likely that we’ll see other products with a similar focus join them if they prove successful.

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The Home Smart project was first kicked off in 2012, although it wasn’t until 2015 that consumers started seeing its results, with its launch of a range of wirelessly charging furniture. 

Since then, a variety of other smart and not-so-smart tech-integrated furniture has been put out by IKEA, including the TRÅDFRI range of affordable smart lights that are able to communicate with Apple HomeKit, Google Home and Amazon Alexa.

While no specific products have been hinted at yet, it’s fair to assume we can expect the frequency at which they arrive to increase, as the new Head of Home Smart, Björn Block says it is “just getting started”.

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