AGS Cinemas, Navalur. Opened in the Coromandel Plaza about
3-4 years back. Being within the IT corridor of Chennai, the cinemas have been
doing pretty good business. But the mall has remained largely unoccupied. In
fact, fully unoccupied. Except for the movies and a few eateries thriving on
the moviegoers falling hungry, the entire retail space has found no takers. The
reasons probably are being too far from the city limits, and the builders
looking a bit too much into the future.
If you think this is a plan gone awry, well then how about
this? A mall in China, New South China Mall, which was going to be the biggest
mall in the world in terms of leasable retail area, has been 99% unoccupied
since it was built in 2005. That’s 8 years running, and still no one has turned
up. What makes it more startling is, it exists in an area which is probably the
world’s biggest megalopolis.
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| A usual day in the Great Mall of China |
Alex Hu, a Chinese Instant Noodles tycoon built this monster
mall in the city of Dongguan in Guangdong province. It was so large in its
entirety that it was dubbed the Great Mall of China, for obvious reasons. This
mall was going to be the symbol of the bubbling consumer culture of China. It
was also ironic that China being a communist country was now home to the world’s
biggest symbol of capitalism. On completion, the mall covered about 9 and a
half million square feet, with over 2300 retail spaces.
The mall was expected to have a daily footfall of 70000
upwards. It was going to be the abode of retailers from all over the world. It
was going to be THE mall in the world. But, none of these came to fruition.
China’s “If you build it they will come” mentality had gone kaput.
Reason? The location, though within a megalopolis, was a
terrible decision. Dongguan is a city of factories, and most of the dwellers
are factory workers. Its connectivity with nearby cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
and Guangzhou is questionable, with no effective transportation. Alex Hu built
it here for he wanted to build in his home city, but it just did not work out. The
site of the mall is a complete disaster.
Owing to these factors, the mall bears a deserted look. It
has maintained a consistent 1% occupancy rate. Not a consistency the builders
would be proud of. It bears the looks of a ghost town. The difference being
ghost towns had people before who left due to various reasons. But here, No one
ever came. If anyone ever wanted to know how a post apocalyptic world will look
like, this might be the right place to be.
Get a detailed insight into this mall here.
Nice one! Apart from the transportation and demographics, any info on the renting costs?
ReplyDeleteIts not always about this, Walmart has certain outlets in very outskirts of the city. People see it as a travel experience when they go shopping. Depends on what Donnguan had in mind too !
No Info about the rent, but Im sure it would not be that much of an issue. High rents might lead to 50% of the retail spaces lying vacant. Not 99%.
ReplyDeleteAnd transportation is also a big hassle. You can read in the detailed story, it took the guy about 2 hours just to locate the mall. Im confident no one would bother to take so much pains to goto a mall. In US, even outskirts of the city might take you half an hour at max.