UK retail giant Tesco will spend US$801m in China this year opening 23 large shopping malls throughout the country in a bid to increase its market share.
Tesco still lags some way behind France's Carrefour and US chain Wal-mart, the Financial Times reported.
On Saturday the group opened the first of its planned 23 malls in Qingdao, on the southern tip of China's Shandong Peninsula, and 50,000 shoppers turned up to the unveiling.
Shaun Rein of China Market Research says consumer awareness of Tesco's brand is poor and that existing Tesco stores in China are somewhat drab and do little to inspire consumers.
Tesco's ‘Lifespace' mall in Qingdao aims to address this, and the 30,000m2 mall cost only US$73.2m to build, around the price of a single Tesco UK store according to the group's China chief executive Ken Towle.
Tesco will have 82 hypermarkets operating in China by February but sales there are still less than two per cent of the group's total.
Wal-mart's share of Chinese hypermarket sales in 2009 was Yn45bn, Carrefour's Yn33bn, while Tesco accounted for just Yn11bn according to data from Euromonitor.
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