New World's 20-year-old anchors are closing — a department-store era ends

New World Department Store China, the mainland retail flagship of Hong Kong's New World Development, listed in 2007 and once ran more than forty stores. By the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, the network stood at 22 — fifteen 'New World' and seven 'Paris Spring' doors, about 920,000 square meters across twelve cities — and the whole machine earned HK$25.3 million of profit on HK$1.18 billion of revenue.

The autumn of 2025 took two anchors at once. The Lanzhou store ended operations on September 1 as its lease expired, landlord Tianzheng Zhongguang taking the site back — the same wave that ended Lanzhou's 22-year-old Xidan Mall. Then on December 11 the landlord of the Changsha Wuyi Square store, Hunan Supply and Marketing Group, published a leasing notice that all but declared the exit of the 34,000-sqm store opened in September 2006. The reasons were structural: aging hardware, homogenized brands, traffic pulled to IFS and Dayue City complexes. Chengdu and Yanjiao doors had already closed.

The company's answer is 'one store, one policy': classified management of stores plus small self-operated formats — four LOL creative spaces and three New World supermarkets as of mid-2025. But the concession model's arithmetic is unforgiving — commission income moves with foot traffic, and foot traffic has moved. In August 2026 reports named the roughly 20-year-old Chongqing store as the next candidate. With the parent developer posting its first loss in two decades in 2024, there is little surplus to pay for the reinvention each remaining store needs.