Hyundai opened a duty-free megastore as the pandemic hit — shut it 5 years later

On 20 February 2020, Hyundai Duty Free opened its second downtown store on floors 6–13 of Doosan Tower in Seoul's Dongdaemun district — 15,551 square metres leased for five years after Doosan handed back its duty-free patent in October 2019. The opening went ahead on schedule even as the pandemic was already shrinking the consumer market; the store was pitched at trend-sensitive foreign visitors in their twenties and thirties, and the group talked of ₩2 trillion in duty-free sales.

The recovery the store was built for never arrived in that shape. Chinese group tourism did not return at pre-pandemic scale, and spending patterns shifted. The Dongdaemun store was still doing around ₩220 billion in annual sales by 2025, but the losses kept accumulating across the chain.

On 1 April 2025, Hyundai DF disclosed that the Dongdaemun store would close on 31 July and its patent be returned. At the same time the flagship Trade Center store was cut from three floors to two, and the company ran the first voluntary retirement programme in its history. In one announcement, half of its four-store network was closed or downsized.