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January 3, 2015 7:00 pm JST
Chinese retail
Wanda's new megamall offers rides,dives and a butler by your side
KEN MORIYASU, Nikkei staff writer
The Wanda Reign Wuhan hotel, left, and the Han Theatre, right, are major attractions in the Wuhan Central Cultural District.
DALIAN, China -- Shopping in modern China can be a hassle. The roads are crowded, the air is bad and the queues long. Under such circumstances, the surge in online shopping is understandable. China's biggest mall operator, Dalian Wanda Group, wants to buck that trend and bring brick-and-mortar stores back into fashion. Its strategy is to reduce retail space and add entertainment. Shopping in China may never be the same again.
Spanning an area of 1.8 sq. km, equivalent to about 250 soccer fields, Wanda is building their biggest shopping facility to date. The "Wuhan Central Cultural District" is a multifunction shopping city in the capital of the southern province of Hubei. On Dec. 20, Wanda opened two cultural facilities that are to serve as the central attractions.
On one end of the district is the Han Show Theatre, home to a circus-type performance created by the former director of the world-famous Cirque du Soleil, Franco Dragone. In one scene, actors, some former Olympic divers, jump from a 27-meter-high ceiling into a pool that is set in the middle of the audience. The leap lasts 2.5 seconds. The diver hits the surface at speeds of around 84 kph.
At the opposite end of the premises is the Wanda Movie Park, one of China's largest indoor amusement facilities. It features six original rides, including "Hubei in the Air," which takes place in the largest immersive theater in China. Visitors are taken on a bird's flight. A combination of real-life cinematography and special effects portrays Hubei's best scenery. Sprays of mist and gusts of wind make the attraction more lifelike.
"Wuhan is located in the physical center of China," said Wanda Culture Industry Group Vice President Tang Jun. "People have always passed through it, from north, south, west and east. They just didn't stay overnight." Tang calculates that Wanda can get 300,000 people through its doors a day, with a significant portion of them sleeping over.
Wanda has opened two hotels in the district. The Wanda Reign Wuhan hotel is the flagship of the group's accommodation business. The group's billionaire chairman, Wang Jianlin, likes to call it "China's only seven-star hotel." What separates the hotel from others is not the gold-plated toilet, or the $32,000 mattress, but "the service we try to offer," said the hotel's general manager Boris Blobel.
Broader plan
Central to that service is the butler. Each guest that stays in a suite or on the executive floor is assigned a butler, who will welcome the guest at the airport, unpack suitcases upon arrival and even sleep in the room next door so as to be available 24/7.
The Wuhan Central Cultural District is one of 10 megamalls Wanda is building across the country. Whereas the group's previous 107 shopping malls were located in densely populous cities, these cultural themed megamalls will be located in such places as Harbin, Nanchang and Wuxi. Wanda's Wang thinks that as Chinese get richer, hundreds of millions of them will zigzag the nation for weekend breaks.
Wanda turned to the stock market to raise the funds for its megamalls. The group's property development arm, Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties, listed in Hong Kong on Dec. 23, raking in 28.8 billion Hong Kong dollars ($3.71 billion). However, the initial market response was somewhat lukewarm as the first day of trading closed below the IPO price.
The rapid growth in online shopping pushed Wanda into its megamall strategy. Alibaba in mid-2014 raised $25 billion in a New York IPO. Group founder Jack Ma Yun overtook Wang on the Forbes China Rich List after the IPO. Alibaba's online platforms sold 57.1 billion yuan ($9.3 billion) in goods on China's Singles' Day, Nov. 11.
A while ago, Wang and Ma made a public bet worth 100 million yuan over whether online shopping could overtake purchases at physical stores in the next 10 years. Ma said yes and Wang said no. The jury is still out.
http://asia.nikkei.com/print/article/68307
