China Tops World's Shopping Mall Craze

[beijingwalker]

China Tops World's Shopping Mall Craze
7/11/2013 @ 11:48

Everyone loves the China consumer story. But an overbuild of shopping malls has made China the top shopping mall developer on Earth, despite the fact that many of these malls in third tier cities are largely vacant.

If you follow China you know that the Chinese consumer is the hottest emerging market investment story around. So it goes without saying that China is far and away the No. 1 developer of shopping malls.

Last year, the country was the No. 1 developer of that ubiquitous symbol of consumer capitalism: the shopping mall.

According to global real estate firm CB Richard Ellis, 2012 was once again the year of the dragon.

There was little development in the more mature U.S. and west European markets. But other emerging markets did not come close to competing with China.

Nearly all of the new retail space in emerging markets was being built in China, and most of that was being done in peripheral areas of large cities. In many Chinese cities, the mismatch between demand and supply has led to increasingly high rents in prime areas and high vacancies elsewhere, CBRE said.

Four Chinese cities were in the top five in terms of new space completed in 2012. So these are all brand new malls, less than a year old.

Leading the list of emerging market cities crazy for shopping malls was Chengdu (with 616,000 square meters of new mall space in four shopping centers), followed by Tianjin (600,000 square meters in five malls), Shenyang (about 500,000 square meters) and Beijing (about 480,000).

Although Tier 2 cities such as Chengdu, Tianjin and Shenyang already have a large number of shopping malls, they also have very large populations, ranging from 8-12 million which lead to opportunities for further development, CBRE said in a report published back in April.

The same holds for much larger cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing. Many malls. More to come, says CBRE. Especially in more suburban areas along the outskirts of the downtown city centers.

Chinese cities continue to dominate development activity. Seven out of the top 10 most active development markets globally are in China, with Chinese cities accounting for half of all the malls under construction in the 180 cities surveyed by CBRE worldwide.

Interior Chinese city, Chengdu, has a whopping 2.9 million square meters of new malls under construction, more than the combined pipeline in the survey’s 86 Western European cities.

Mall Mania: Top 10 Cities For New Shopping Mall Projects*

1. Chengdu, China
2. Tianjin, China
3. Shenyang, China
4. Beijing, China
5. Istanbul, Turkey
6. Bangkok, Thailand
7. St. Petersburg, Russia
8. Shenzhen, China
9. Kuala Lumpur, Maylasia
10. Mexico City, Mexico

*2012 shopping mall space over 100,000 square meters. Ranked from highest to lowest. CBRE research, March 2013.

 

[FireFistAce]

yay, istanbul is 5th. it would have been higher if it wasn't because of those jerks (capulcular )