HKIA ‘OUTPERFORMED’ DOWNTOWN
“Together with continuous marketing promotion effort, HKIA retail sales outperformed Hong Kong overall retail sales during the year of 2015 and in the first quarter of 2016,” the airport operator said in June.
DFS Group’s City of Dreams store in Macau.
However, as has been well documented, core HKIA retailer DFS continues to face ‘challenges’, particularly in Macau and Hong Kong’ according to majority shareholder LVMH, in the first half of this year.
“Well I hope you don’t just get your information from the LVMH financial communication,” Schaus said. “Just look at the Swiss Watch Federation’s communication every month; just look into that and you see exactly what’s happening.
“You see that, for instance, the watch sales in Hong Kong and Macau took a deep dive in the last few months versus what it was before, so there has been a reduction of luxury business in Hong Kong and Macau, irrespective of DFS.
“What was before the epicentre of the exuberant boom in Chinese luxury consumption has naturally been the epicentre of the post-exuberance evolution. It’s natural; whatever goes up the highest also has to come down the most. And that’s what we have seen.”
MACAU BUSINESS COMING BACK?
However, Schaus is confident that Hong Kong has seen the worst of the decline and that the trading environment is likely to start improving in the near future.
“We know that Hong Kong is still difficult and there are still political issues, but what we are seeing now is that [decline] is flattening off…And you see Macau starting to come back in many ways.
“We’ll see how it goes, but I think we are probably seeing that we have reached a kind of new level from which we can grow again.
“We know that Hong Kong is still difficult and there are still political issues, but what we are seeing now is that [business] is flattening off,” says Philippe Schaus.
“We don’t own the truth; we can only have our beliefs, so we do believe that Macau is coming back. But what we also believe is that what we have been doing in Macau is the right thing in terms of transformation of the offer – look at the City of Dreams for example.
“We do believe that the market is going to come back, or is coming back…Let’s see what happens in the next months and couple of years.”
