Ito-Yokado's China mall experiment ended in six years — back to supermarkets

Ito-Yokado entered Chengdu in 1997 and for two decades set the standard for the city's retail: in 2012, four of its Chengdu doors ranked first, second, third and fifth by annual revenue among all Ito-Yokado stores worldwide, and the Shuangnan store reached ¥1.6 billion of sales in 2019. But the department-store supermarket format was losing ground to the shopping center, and in January 2019 the company made its leap — opening Ito Plaza at the Greenland 468 site, its first shopping-center project anywhere: 82,000 square meters, which it called its Asia flagship.

Timing and model both ran against it. The pandemic arrived within a year of opening. Ito-Yokado had never run a mall of this scale — its skill was running its own merchandise, not leasing and tenant mix. The site around it never matured: the Greenland Center 468 tower next door stalled, and newer projects — Shimao Plaza, Longfor's Dong'an Tianjie — pulled traffic away. The closure notice came on December 16, 2024; the lights went out on February 28, 2025. Everbright Anshi won the bid to take the property over and reposition it under its Daroncheng brand.

Four months later it happened again: the Financial City store in the China Huashang Financial Center closed on June 30, 2025. The network shrank to nine doors — seven in Chengdu, one in Leshan, one in Beijing — and management insists this is a retreat, not an exit: Sichuan remains the strategic core, some stores have recovered customer flow and been profitable for six consecutive quarters, and a new store for Chengdu's affluent Luhu area is planned for 2028. The mall experiment is being quietly written off; what remains is the supermarket business the company has run since 1997.