IndiaRetailBiz

“We wanted to do something groundbreaking. We wanted to leave our mark on history. We expected the mall to average more than 70,000 visitors a day.” — A spokesperson for Hu Guirong, Developer of the Mall.

You may believe it or not but its true!

While Indian retailers are struggling hard to find suitable real estate to set their shop, the world’s largest shopping mall, located where else but in China, is nearly empty.

The South China Mall, a retail cum entertainment facility with a whopping seven million sq ft of space, originally built to accommodate 1,500 stores, even three years after its opening in 2005, is not just the world’s largest, but with fewer than a dozen stores, it is also the world’s emptiest, according to a report in the Nation published from Dubai.

Located within the wealthiest region of China’s southern Pearl River Delta, the mall is a part of the country’s new arsenal of superlatives: the world’s largest airport terminal, the highest train track, the golf resort with the most holes.

Three years ago at the time of its opening, The New York Times had featured The South China Mall on its front page, symbolizing it as part of China’s “astonishing new consumer culture.” The Times then went on to describe the changes taking place in the Chinese consumer behaviour  saying, “Chinese have started to embrace America’s ’shop till you drop’ ethos and are in the middle of a buy-at-the-mall frenzy.”

About 500 new malls have been built in China over the last five years, according to Kevin Jiang, a researcher at the Mall China Information Center. All of these malls are waiting for the arrival of the gigantic Chinese mega-middle consumer class, comprising four to five hundred millions of prosperous, educated people with high disposable income. It is hoped that these consumers will not only walk through these malls and buy lots of stuff that they probably don’t need!