Elements, Hong Kong's latest colossal shopping mall and luxury goods temple, is a living illustration of the city's bid to lure a new generation of brand-mad spenders from the Chinese mainland.
The new development has a massive 1,115m2 Gucci store, not to mention Prada, Ferragamo and Versace boutiques.
It has a direct rail link to Hong Kong's airport and buses to and from Shenzhen airport just over the border to draw some of the more than 10 million mainland visitors who pour into the southern territory each year.
The visitors above all come to Hong Kong to take advantage of low import and sales taxes on luxury brands, although the market remains in general less sophisticated than Europe.
A Chanel spokesman said the territory did not yet show a huge demand for haute couture designs in the same way that Los Angeles or Paris would, but the demand for ready-to-wear is huge.
"The Hong Kong economy has developed one of the most affluent consumer societies in the world and this in turn has created opportunities for Chanel," the spokesman said.
The company, however, also uses Hong Kong as a launching pad into China, to tap the rapidly growing middle class in major cities and has plans for expansion over the next few years.
Betty Leong, head of retail development at MTR Corp, the rail conglomerate that spent US$10 billion developing the area that includes the Elements mall, said Hong Kong was now taking full advantage of mainland appetites.
"A lot of individual visitors from the mainland travel to Hong Kong and this number will only go up. We are building on our mainland customers," Leong said. "There's definitely a big demand for luxury products here. Our statistics show the more established the brands, the better their businesses have performed."
Official figures show Hong Kongers spent HK$30 billions (US$3.8 billion) just on clothes and accessories in the first 11 months of last year, one of the highest per capita spends in Asia.
In the same period, advertising spending on luxury fashion brands in Hong Kong, including Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana was 14 percent more than the whole of 2006 at HK$432 million, a survey by market researcher Nielsen showed.
And the advertising seems to be helping draw mainland Chinese into the fold.
A recent HSBC study showed that three-quarters of affluent mainland Chinese have bought luxury goods, citing the products' quality, fashion and status symbol as the reasons for their purchases.
Moreover, China's growing economic might means it has itself become a powerful figure in the fashion industry.
Hong Kong Fashion Week launched this week, with the Chinese shopper high in the mind of the top Asian designers who gathered to show their fall and winter collections.
"Hong Kong is an important platform to reach the China market. We have made a lot of effort to invite buyers from the mainland," said Katherine Chan, a spokeswoman for the show.
Last year, the show attracted 5,037 buyers from China, up from 4,260 in 2004.
"They have high purchasing power and are willing to spend money on fashion," Chan said.
Increasingly, luxury brands and designers are by-passing Hong Kong to head straight into China.
Last year, Italian luxury group Fendi staged a speculator fashion show on the Great Wall to show off its new line partly designed by Karl Lagerfeld, while Giorgio Armani continues to expand into major Chinese cities.
Lane Crawford, one of Asia's oldest luxury department stores based in Hong Kong, also opened its first branch in Beijing last year. It has estimated there are about four million luxury goods customers in Beijing alone.
"Whether it's luxury product or not, companies are interested in the Chinese market," said Mary Chiang, who has more than two decades of experience in public relations and represents some of the biggest global luxury brands. "China's population size is huge. It has a fast growing economy. It's only the tip of the iceberg. Whatever you sell you would want to go into China."
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
Conflict with Taiwan could leave China with “massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions,” a US think tank said in a report released on Monday. The German Marshall Fund released a report titled If China Attacks Taiwan: The Consequences for China of “Minor Conflict” and “Major War” Scenarios. The report details the “massive” economic, military, social and international costs to China in the event of a minor conflict or major war with Taiwan, estimating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could sustain losses of more than half of its active-duty ground forces, including 100,000 troops. Understanding Chinese
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
RSS