China Mall Developers – Time to Shop Around – and more of Today’s China Real Estate Links | November 28, 2012

Here is a list of the day’s latest China real estate news collected from around the web:

• China Mall Developers – Time to Shop Around

  Say “shop till you drop” to a mall developer and you’re likely to make him smile.

  But property developers who have cashed in on the growing middle class and the expanding ranks of shoppers in China are facing a new reality: Not every city can be a shopping mecca with an endless appetite for new places to spend those spare renminbi.

  Shenyang, Zhengzhou, Wuhan and Shanghai are among the cities that should probably be avoided if you happen to be a shopping mall developer, according to a recent analysis by Credit Suisse Equity Research.

• Starbucks Plays to Local Chinese Tastes

  After nearly 14 years of working to persuade China to buy into its foreign coffee culture, Starbucks Corp. SBUX -0.59% is aiming to become more Chinese as it plans a rapid expansion in the country.

  Belinda Wong, president of Starbucks China, said in an interview that Starbucks aims to roll out 800 new stores in the next three years to add to its existing fleet of 700. Over that period it will increase the number of employees to more than 30,000 from the current 12,000.

• China October industrial profits jump 20.5 percent, signal rebound

  Profits earned by industrial companies leaped 20.5 percent in October over the previous year to 500 billion yuan, accelerating from September’s 7.8 percent year-on-year increase, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.

  It said China’s industrial enterprises made 4 trillion yuan ($647 billion) in profits in the first 10 months of 2012, with earnings at power generation, technology and food processing companies seeing double digit rises in October – putting them firmly back on the path of profit growth, following a 1.8 percent fall in profits in the first nine months of 2012 versus 2011.

• Hokkaido property a real draw for Chinese buyers

  A spat over disputed islands has put a damper on Chinese sales of Japanese products from cars to cosmetics, but there is relief in one market at a fall-off of foreign buyers – real estate.

  The chance to own land in Japan’s beautiful mountain wilderness of Hokkaido has proved a real draw for moneyed Chinese, but there are local fears over what some see as a land grab targeting forests and water sources.

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