Naga City Walk Opens Next Week

KHMER TIMES
MAY KUNMAKARA

NagaCorp, which runs the NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh, will open the Kingdom’s first underground retail mall next week. KT/Chor Sokunthea

The Hong Kong-listed NagaCorp, which runs the NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh, will open the Kingdom’s first underground retail mall next week to attract more Chinese tourists to the Kingdom.

Timothy McNally, chairman of NagaCorp said in an interview with CNBC yesterday that the Naga city walk will be opened to the public this month and added that it will also be an outlet for premium branded luxury products.

“We are operating Naga city walk and it will be a premium first class retail outlet to cater to Cambodia’s significant tourism growth. There are 7.5 million tourists expected by 2020 and Naga city walk will open soon for them,” said Mr. McNally.

Early this year, the Ministry of Tourism released a White Paper titled “China Ready for Cambodia Tourism” outlining a five-year strategy for attracting Chinese tourists to the country with the aim of getting two million of them to visit the country per year by 2020.

In the first four months of this year, Cambodia recorded about 275,000 Chinese tourist arrivals, up by 13.6 percent compared to the same period last year. Last year, 694,712 tourists from China visited the Kingdom and this was a 14.5 percent increase from 2014.

A source from the China Duty Free Group (CDFG), the largest Chinese duty-free operator based in Beijing, confirmed that Naga city walk will officially be opened next Wednesday.

The source, who is not authorized to speak to the media, said that the mall in Naga city walk will be divided into three zones. The first, he said, was for well-known bands that are duty-free, while the second was for high-quality made-in-Cambodia products and the third was rented space to authorized dealers of luxury brands.

NagaWorld, NagaCorp’s profitable unit, recorded revenue of $153.8 million in the first quarter of 2016, representing an increase of 35 percent in year-on-year terms, NagaCorp announced in April. In 2015, NagaCorp’s gross revenue increased by 26 percent to $480.6 million from the previous year.

NagaCorp’s current market capitalization is about $1.5 billion. Since its listing on the Hong Kong Exchange in 2006, NagaCorp has paid out healthy dividends to its shareholders. For the past eight financial years from 2006 to 2013, the company has paid out a total of about $538 million in dividends to its shareholders. The average dividend payout ratio per year for the past eight financial years is 68.7 percent.

In 2015, NagaCorp’s net profit increased by 27 percent to $172.6 million and the earnings per share of was at 7.60 cents a share. The declared final dividend to shareholders was 1.89 cents a share.

In November 2012, the company broke ground on Naga2 comprising the Naga city walk and TSCLK complex to include new hotels, restaurants, entertainment and shopping outlets. Last May, NagaCorp held a groundbreaking ceremony for a casino resort project in Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East.