Lotte's Bundang store ranked bottom for years — closed after 27 years

Lotte took over Bundang's failed Blue Hill department store — a casualty of the IMF crisis under the Cheonggu Group — and reopened it as its Bundang store in 1999. For twenty-seven years it served the district from Sunnae-dong, Seongnam, but for most of that time it ranked at the bottom of Korean department stores: bottom tier of roughly 70 stores nationwide, below 50th of the Big Three's 57 stores by sales.

The structure had been set a decade earlier. In late 2010, Lotte Shopping sold the Bundang building bundled with five Lotte Mart locations to raise cash and leased the store back — turning its own shop into a landlord's asset. When the landlord decided the building was worth more remodeled into offices and retail, there was little to negotiate with: on 19 December 2025 the two sides agreed to end operations at the end of March 2026.

The pressure around the store had been building for years. Hyundai's Pangyo flagship, opened in 2015 a few stations away, pulled the district's premium spending; online shopping took the rest. Lotte framed the closure as concentrating resources on core stores — and signalled more is coming, with Busan Centum City, Daegu Sangin and Seoul Gwanak all rumoured candidates for sale, closure or conversion.