State-controlled China National Service Corporation for Chinese Personnel Working Abroad (CNSC) has today (10 October) opened its first inbound duty free cruise port store at the Tianjin International Cruise Home Port.

Spanning 255sq m, the store, which soft-opened in September 2019, offers traditional duty free product categories such as liquor and tobacco, fragrances and cosmetics and fine food.

Mainstream liquor and tobacco products from home and abroad are available in-store, alongside international fragrances and cosmetics brands such as Filorga, Laneige, Sekkisei, Ferragamo and Versace.

The largest cruise home port in Northern China, the facility handles 920,000 passengers per year and is around 175km from the centre of Beijing.

LANDMARK OPENING

According to CNSC, the opening of the store is particularly significant as it is the first inbound cruise port duty free shop to open in China since interested parties were invited to bid for the right to operate such stores in 2016. TRBusiness understands there was also a tender for a duty free opportunity at the Shanghai Port International Cruise Terminal.

The official opening of the Tianjin cruise store follows the recent inauguration of CNSC’s downtown Dalian store. Three further downtown stores are set to open this year in Harbin (2,713sq m) Hangzhou (3,000sq m) and Zhengzhou (2,500sq m). These will be preceded by the planned unveiling of a new 1,705sq m downtown store in Qingdao in Q2 2020 and further downtown openings in Nanchang, Hefei, Chongqinf and Kunming pegged for Q4 next year.

With the Tianjin International Cruise Home Port located relatively close to Beijing, CNSC is looking to enhance connections between the new cruise store in Tianjin and its Beijing downtown store and create synergies between other operations.

The company said: “With our Beijing and Tianjin operations the focal points, we are looking to radiate our duty free businesses in Qingdao, Dalian, Harbin and Japan and create a closed loop for duty free consumption at ports, cities and overseas.”

Meanwhile, CNSC is looking to build on its cooperation with Caissa Touristic, with whom it worked on the Tianjin cruise store project. Caissa Touristic cooperates with 36 Tourism Bureaus in more than 25 countries, seven cruise companies, 38 airlines and 30 hotels.

CNSC commented: “We will innovate the cooperation with Caissa, the shareholder of the Tianjin project, give full play to each other’s respective advantages, carry out business in a coordinated way and jointly create a new duty free ecology for tourism.”

Evita Qu, Deputy General Manager, CNSC told TRBusiness: “We have extended our channel to the international cruise port business because cruising is very popular in China.”