Liu Minxia

SHENZHEN-BASED department store operator Maoye International Holdings Ltd. said yesterday it planned to open a flagship store in Nanshan District as early as the first half of next year, in the company’s move to expand westward.

Maoye said it would invest 1 billion yuan (US$141.09 million) to build a 50,000-square-meter nine-story department store and a 20,000-square-meter high-end office building in the Houhai area in Nanshan.

At present, Maoye, a leading retailer targeting the medium to high-end segment of the retail market, has four stores in Shenzhen, all in Luohu and Futian districts. As the Houhai area is becoming one of the three most important shopping destinations in Shenzhen, along with Dongmen and Huaqiangbei, Maoye said it hoped to take advantage of its more than 10 years of experience in Shenzhen’s retail sector and gain a foothold in the new commercial center.

Maoye is also looking to open new stores in Shenzhen’s other districts, including Longgang and Bao’an, the company’s spokesperson surnamed Ou said yesterday.

He said Maoye planned to add 12 new stores in Shenzhen and other Chinese cities in the next three to five years and also hoped to expand into new cities with high consumption power.

Three stores under construction in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, Shenyang, Liaoning Province, and Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, would open later this year or next year. Construction work on another four stores in Shenyang, Wuxi, Chengdu and Chong-

qing would start soon, Ou said.

Maoye, controlled by Huang Maoru, who was ranked by Shenzhen-based New Fortune magazine as the city’s third-richest man last year, currently operates 15 stores in eight Chinese cities. The company spokesman yesterday declined to disclose how much it earned last year.

China’s overall department store sales are expected to total 685 billion yuan in 2010, an increase of 72.5 percent over 2005, industry analysts have predicted.

In January, Maoye scrapped a Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) that planned to raise as much as US$904 million in the dwindling worldwide demand for share sales as some Asian markets started to turn bearish from the latter half of last year.

Maoye said it would review relaunching the sale which would have been Shenzhen’s largest IPO by a department store operator.