Inditex

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Inditex Group

Type	Public (ITX)
Founded	1975
Headquarters	A Coruña, Spain
Key people	Amancio Ortega Gaona (President)
Industry	Retail
Products	Clothing
Revenue	€6.741 billion (2005)
Employees	60,000
Website	www.inditex.com

Inditex, Industrias de Diseño Textil, S.A., (IBEX-35:ITX), or ("Textil Design Industries, Inc.") is a large Spanish corporation and one of the world 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 over 3,000 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 village of Alicante’s province in the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

[edit] 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 or Tokyo's Shibuya Shopping Centre.

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.