Paris may overtake London’s West End as Europe’s largest retail destination in the next five years as UK shoppers are drawn away from the capital by new developments and out-of-town centers, a new report showed.
It’s “more than possible” consumers will spend more in the French capital by 2013 than they do in the London district, Jonathan de Mello, director of retail property consultancy at Dublin-based Experian Group Ltd, said in a telephone interview. Spending in Paris this year will be 5.87 billion euros (US$7.46 billion), less than the 6.17 billion euros spent in the West End, Experian said yesterday in an e-mailed report.
“Paris is not too far behind and it doesn’t take too much for the West End to lose its position,” de Mello said, citing planned developments at Stratford City to the east of London and Elephant & Castle to the south, along with plans to extend the Brent Cross shopping mall to the north of the capital.
Westfield Group opened London’s largest shopping mall last month, bringing to four the total number of regional shopping centers in the city, with a population of 7.5 million.
The West End will lose 9 percent of spending to competitors next year, Mello predicts. The shopping district extending around Oxford Street and Regent Street has 620 stores spread over 6.4km, making it one of the largest retail areas in the world. It attracts 200 million shoppers a year.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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