Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
Issue link: https://sct.epubxp.com/i/513366
10 S C T / J u n e 2 0 1 5 w o r l d aT a g l a n C e Shopping and entertain- ment, alongside business conferences, drove an 8.2 percentñrise in the number of visitors to Dubai in 2014, according to Helal Saeed Almarri, director general of Dubai's Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing. The emirate is aiming to attract 20 million visitors annually by 2020, he says. Aldar Properties plans to build a 31,000-square-meter (about 334,000 square feet) mall in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that is to open in 2017. The Al Falah Mall, as the project is called, will contain a supermarket, a cinema, a food court and entertainment tenants. The developer also says it will ex- pand its Al Jimi Mall by an additional 65 stores, bring- ing the size of this Carrefour- anchored shopping center to about 75,000 square meters. TIAA-CREF paid £80 mil- lion (about $122 million) for the 40 percent of U.K.ñ based TIAA Henderson Real Estate Co. it did not already own. The latter has some €23.6 billion (about $26 million) in real estate assets across Europe, Asia and Aus- tralia, many of them retail. Wal-Mart Stores says it plans to accelerate its store expan- sion in China by opening 115 by the end of 2017. The company is targeting such cities as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuhan. As of January, Wal-Mart had 411 stores across China. ANTAD, the retail associa- tion of Mexico, told Presi- dent Enrique Peña Nieto that its members will invest between $20 billion and $25 billion on new stores and renovations in the course of his six-year term, which began in 2012. Walmart de México y Centroamérica will be in- vesting about $46 million in Nicaragua this year to build three supermarkets and that country's first Walmart Supercenter. Russia has overtaken France as the country in Europe with the most shopping center space, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Russia ended last year with some 17.7 million square meters (about 190 million square feet) of space, versus France's 17.6 million square meters. Aeon Co. has opened a mall on a former golf course once owned by the U.S. military on Okinawa, in Japan. The nearly 840,000-square-foot Aeon Mall Okinawa Rycom encompasses 235 stores. Aeon says it hopes the mall will attract some 12 million visitors per year. S C T