Fashion Island defers lifestyle-centre plan

The delay is due to the current economic downturn, which has impacted the confidence of the company as well as its retail tenants.

Prasert Sriuranpong, executive director |of Siam Retail Development, said the company had earlier planned to build another lifestyle complex on the 18-rai plot bought recently by the company.

The construction of the new lifestyle centre project, however, has been delayed to 2010.

He said the new lifestyle complex will require capital investment of at least Bt500 million and the construction work will take about one year. The new lifestyle complex will have retail space of between 10,000 and 40,000 square metres under the three-storey building.

"The open-air lifestyle complex will be connected with our existing Fashion Island enclosed shopping centre to create a new 'hybrid' mall.

"Fashion Island itself has total building space of 350,000 square metres, including 180,000 square metres of retail space. We will take another year before starting the contruction work of the lifestyle complex after monitoring the economic situation," said Prasert.

He said the company recently invested Bt500 million in the major renovation of its Fashion Island complex. The renovation process was started at the end of last year and will be totally completed by the third quarter this year.

"We want to make ourselves a shopping destination for people living in this area. The new lifestyle complex will make us more dynamic and offer a good choice for consumers who can enjoy different shopping experiences," said Prasert.

He added that core customers of Fashion Island are families with kids. Prasert said the company has not seen any significant impact from the big drop in the number of foreign tourists due to the global economic difficulty and local unrest. "Fashion Island is a shopping mall located on the outskirts of Bangkok and almost 100 per cent of shoppers are local people," he said.

He said the shopping complex saw 7 per cent higher visitor traffic last year. It currently attracts about 15,000 cars on weekdays, and between 20,000 and 22,000 cars on weekends. However, spending by shoppers at this time is declining slightly.

"We will have big-scale campaigns and events every single month throughout 2009. They include Chinese New Year at the end of January, Watch Fair in February, and Beauty World in October. We have also increased our marketing budget to Bt30 million this year, up from Bt20 million in 2008," said Prasert.