TOP 10 OPERATORS 4: CHINA DUTY FREE GROUP
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CDFG wins new Chengdu contract and expects Haitang Bay sales to double in 2020
While Covid-19 forced the closure of China Duty Free Group’s airport stores, its business on the island of Hainan is booming thanks to a huge duty free allowance increase in July. In an exclusive interview, President Charles Chen tells Charlotte Turner why he is confident that the group’s sales in 2020 will reach the figure registered in 2019 and may even exceed it.
hina Duty Free Group (CDFG) enjoyed another successful year in 2019,
registering sales of RMB47.36 billion/$6.85 billion, boosted by the milestone 10-year contract it won at Beijing Daxing Airport. CDFG subsequently opened its dazzling new stores there in November last year. “We were very, very satisfied
with 2019,” Chen tells TRBusiness. “One of the highlights was clearly the new business at Beijing Daxing Airport. It’s not so easy to achieve what we did last year… we achieved everything we set out to.” CDFG operates a sprawling duty
free empire across the three busiest airports in China: Beijing Daxing, Shanghai Pudong and Guangzhou. In the first week of September, it won a contract to operate a new 4,103sqm store at the international departures hall of Chengdu Airport, as revealed exclusively on
TRBusiness.com. “I think you are the first person
to find out that we got the notice from Chengdu Airport that we won a new contract in the new departures
OCTOBER 2020
area,” says Chen. “Chengdu is the fourth largest airport in China in terms of traffic and the purchasing power there is really very strong, so we are really happy with that.”
Strong purchasing power Speaking to TRBusiness in September, Chen says the travel retailer expects to open the new store as early as the end of this year, which might appear unlikely in the current climate. However, as Chen has relayed to TRBusiness in frequent discussions over the last few months, the rise in domestic traffic since the beginning of the summer in China has certainly seen some of the company’s stores actually thrive. As reported by TRBusiness at the end of August, travel analytics company ForwardKeys was predicting that domestic air travel in China would make a full recovery by the start of September. “For China Duty Free I can tell you
that up to the last week performance here [in China] has been really very encouraging,” he says. “I think we reacted very quickly to the situation
when it was most grave around Chinese New Year. From that point we began to fiercely protect our business, because at the time all our airport stores were closing. “But we realised, even at that
time, the purchasing power of the Chinese was still strong and remains so now. They still want to spend in
“I do feel a level of optimism that by the end of this year we can at least reach 2019 sales and maybe even better sales in 2019. As I tell our vendors very clearly, around 60% of the travel retail business in Korea and Japan comes from the Chinese and because the Chinese cannot travel to Korea and Japan [at the moment] they want to spend money within China.”
Charles Chen, President, China Duty Free Group
TOP 10 OPERATORS 19
Above: CDFG President Charles Chen believes that the company will see 2020 sales reach those of 2019 and even exceed them.
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