BIZCHINA / Overseas Investment
ParknShop comes back to city
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2006-12-25 14:26
The Hong Kong supermarket chain ParknShop will return to the Shanghai
market after shutting down nearly all its stores six years ago, company
officials said on December 22.
The retailer, owned by tycoon Li Ka-shing, will open a
13,000-square-meter hypermarket in northern Shanghai's Yangpu District on
Wednesday. The outlet comes on the heels of ParknShop's plan to expand
its retail network outside southern China.
"The hypermarket will be our major focus after re-entering Shanghai for
lower supply chain costs," said a spokeswoman surnamed Huang at the
Shanghai ParknShop office.
"We adopted the same strategy when we entered new markets in the western
and central part of China during the past year."
ParknShop, the largest supermarket retailer in Hong Kong, has opened two
hypermarkets in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and one in Wuhan, Hubei
Province. It also plans to set up a store in Kunming, Yunnan Province.
In its key market in the Pearl River Delta, ParknShop runs more than 30
stores, about half of which are hypermarkets.
"While the southern region remains our major market, we don't want to
give up on Shanghai, from which we retreated six years ago," Huang said.
Entering Shanghai in 1994, ParknShop was the first overseas-funded
supermarket chain in the city. Its store number grew to a peak of 21 in
the late 1990s, many of which were located in downtown areas such as
People's Square.
The Hong Kong retailer was forced to sell most of its stores in 2000 to
Royal Ahold NV - the owner of another supermarket chain called Ding Ding
Xian - as a result of cash flow problems as China's retail regulations at
the time barred overseas funds from being used to increase registered
capital.
Those rules no longer apply.
(For more biz stories, please visit Industry Updates)
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