By Pip Marlow, Managing Director, Microsoft Australia
I’m proud to announce that Sydney has been chosen as the home for the first Microsoft flagship store outside of North America.
The store will be located at Westfield Sydney on Pitt Street Mall and will give customers the same outstanding choice, value and service as our stores overseas and online. It will provide an opportunity to experience the best of Microsoft products like Windows PCs, Surface devices, Windows Phones, Xbox One, Office and more in an innovative and vibrant setting. In addition, the store will feature our Answer Desk – a one-stop shop for questions, troubleshooting, repairs and support for all Microsoft software and hardware. Altogether, these products and services empower our customers to do more, achieve more.
The store will be located at Westfield Sydney on Pitt Street Mall and will give customers the same outstanding choice, value and service as our stores overseas and online.
But this will be much more than a store. It will embody the world class innovation that you have come to expect from Microsoft and be a space where consumers – from teens who love gaming to parents who want to ensure their families are safe online, to small business owners looking for guidance – can visit and learn how to make the most of their technology, so they can make the most of every moment.
We are also committed to being part of the fabric of the local community in which we’ll operate. We will regularly donate volunteer hours, host community events, offer training workshops, support science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and build deeper relationships with our customers, one person at a time. The space will be as much a place for engaging experiences as it is a retail store. It will complement our excellent retail partner network and be a natural extension of our existing online store.
This is a significant development for our business locally as well as globally and is the latest in a series of Microsoft investments in Australia – last October we opened our Microsoft Australia Azure Geos and just a few weeks ago we bought Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online to our local data centres. We also recently opened another Microsoft Innovation Centre in South Australia and we continue to support Australia’s not-for-profit community by giving A$50 million in software donations last year alone.
Microsoft currently has more than 110 physical stores in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, 17 store-in-store locations in China, online stores in 189 countries, and we’re thrilled to add a flagship store in Australia to that list.
As the opening date nears, we look forward to sharing additional details with you. We will have much to celebrate so stay tuned, and I hope to see you in our new store later this year!