Wanda Group’s chairman Jianlin Wang envisions that the group will be supported by four pillars – commercial properties, cultural enterprises, financial institutions and ecommerce – and income and net profits from services areas will constitute two-thirds of the group’s turnover by 2018.
Mr. Wang has bared his ambition to take on Walt Disney Co. and vie for global dominance with the goal to make Wanda Tourism the “world’s largest tourism company”.
Calling out Disney
Disney is the largest tourism company in the world recording nearly 130 million visits in 2014. Adding the anticipated 20 million annual arrivals for the new Shanghai Disney Resort when it opens next year, Disney will likely receive 150 million to 160 million visitors a year by 2020.
Wanda’s strategic goal is to achieve 200 million visits and over RMB100 billion in revenue from its tourism operations annually by 2020. “We will overtake Disney to become the largest tourism company in the world,” Mr Wang said. “We have set such a high target because tourism is an important part of our development. Wanda Group aims to have US$200 billion in assets and market value, US$100 billion in revenue and US$10 billion in profit by 2020.”
Rendering of Guangzhou Wanda Cultural Tourism Park
Mr. Wang said Wanda Cultural Tourism Parks are innovative all-weather attractions that leverage natural scenery outdoor with first-rate stage productions indoors. Besides hotels and shops, Wanda will also build multi-million yuan hospitals in the parks as well.
“We plan to open over 15 Wanda Cultural Tourism Parks in China by 2020. Most of our parks will receive over 10 million visits per year and the slightly larger Wuhan Central Cultural Tourism Zone attraction will receive over 30 million visits per year. Wanda will achieve its goal of 200 million visits to 15 parks in total,” Mr Wang said.
Securing a wholly-owned service loop for distribution
Besides offline resources, Wanda Tourism has also been busy expanding distribution in channels and online resources during the past few years,
Wanda has been using its vast capital resources to acquire over 10 domestic tour operators and is now the largest travel company in China recording over RMB10 billion in annual revenue this year. Its revenue solely from tour operation is expected to reach RMB40 billion by 2020.
Wanda also completed its consolidation of O2O and the innovative and traditional travel industry chains by investing in major OTA LY.com two weeks ago.
”We also own the hotels in our parks, and I won’t rule out acquiring an airline business, the only missing link to complete our tourism service loop,” Mr. Wang said. “In our experience, tourism enterprises must have a complete service loop to shore up the control on pricing in order to achieve the optimum efficiency. So this is our goal,” he said.
“We aim to do two things: Create a Chinese luxury hotel brand overseas, which we are doing with seven hotels under development in major cities around the world, and acquire overseas tourism companies and attractions, or even build mega tourism projects overseas,” he said.
(Translation by David)
