Wanda Group's chairman Jianlin Wang laid bare his ambition to make Wanda Cultural Tourism Park the world’s largest tourism company by 2020 in a recent talk about the tourism sector.
Wanda Cultural Park brand making a name for itself in Europe
The Wanda Culture Industry Group pioneered the Wanda Cultural Tourism City brand in Harbin in 2013 and later expanded the brand to Beijing, Hefei, Wuxi, Dalian and Guangzhou and made it a new key industry of the Wanda Group.
Mr. Wang said Wanda Group would focus on developing its four key industries: commerce, cultural, financial and ecommerce. “Our transition isn’t just for the sake of trying something new, it will be according to our group’s foundation, human resources and innovative capacity. Right now we are consolidating our best attributes to bring to our new operations in the tourism industry,” he said.
“In the past we didn’t have a clear idea about how to develop cultural tourism but we slowly learned by trial and error. We finally came up with the Wanda Cultural Tourism City brand and the three in operation are showing terrific results already. In fact, I’ve just returned from Wuhan where I received the king and queen of Belgium at our Han Show production. News about the Wanda Cultural Tourism City brand has already reached Europe and now we are getting flocks of visitors,” he boasted.
“The world’s biggest tourism company now, Disney, has 130 million visitors to its parks every year. We aim to have 200 million visits by 2020 and our plan depends on having large-scale resorts. Each resort will bring in 10 million to 20 million visits a year, and we will reach our goal if we have a dozen of resorts. Resort business depends on repeat business, and we should leverage our own strengths to develop tourism products,” he said.
Wanda bringing together the best of its industries
Wanda Group has the largest offline customer platform in the world with over 1.6 billion customer visits last year and 2 billion customer visits are expected this year. “As Wanda’s biggest advantage is its offline platform, our transition is to maximize our strengths in this area, while integrating the latest technology and future trends to propel the group forward,” Mr. Wang said.
“The key to Wanda’s transition is the combination of internet and enterprise. The reason why we are entering the tourism and cultural industries at this moment is because thats are the future of China. The higher people’s income and the more developed our economy is, the stronger demand will be for these industries,” he said.
Mr. Wang sees Wanda Group becoming a high tech service company in the future, exemplified by its cinemas and theme parks that are high tech and service-oriented businesses in the cultural industry.(Translation by David)
