Department store retailer Wangfujing has opened its first store in Hainan, the duty-free shopping haven in China where sales boomed during the pandemic when Chinese consumers could not travel abroad.
The Shanghai-listed company held a lavish opening ceremony on January 18, just ahead of the Chinese New Year rush. The property, with a total construction area of over 1.1 million square feet, isself-owned and will be expanded in three phases in Wanning City in the southeast of Hainan.
Under the fascia, WFJ Duty Free, the parent department store group calls the new operation “a starting point” for the company’s dual tax + tax-free business.
As a first toe into duty-free waters for Wangfujing, the choice of Wanning City might strike some observers as an unusual choice. Sanya the tourism center of Hainan; Haikou, the capital; and nearby Mission Hills, have been the preferred, and more obvious, locations for rivals like China Duty Free Group which recently opened the world’s biggest duty-free mall).
Wangfujing says it will rely on Wanning’s “unique coastal culture and tourism features” to help drive traffic, as well as its name which is an iconic national brand in the world of Chinese retailing. Over the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year period, Wangfujing can also rely on pent-up travel demand to generate traffic, now that China has dropped its zero-Covid policy.
Official government data (up to last Wednesday) showed that a total of 480 million trips had been made since the Spring Festival rush began on January 7. That is an increase compared with 2020, but is still 47% down compared with pre-pandemic 2019.
