Wanda Group on Saturday unveiled its second tourism and culture project in the nation this year, which is located in Hefei, East China's Anhui Province, a move to further tap the local tourism market.
The facility, which is also Wanda's fifth tourism and culture project, cost 30 billion yuan ($4.5 billion). It has a total area of more than 900,000 square meters, including an outdoor theme park, a shopping mall with a cinema park and an aqua park, and a bar street and hotels.
The Nanchang Wanda City opened in May, the first such culture and tourism project for the group this year.
One day ahead of the opening in Hefei, the group unveiled a similar plan for Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, the 12th culture and tourism project the group plans to build across the country.
The group plans to open 15 culture and tourism projects in China and five overseas by 2020.
To achieve localization, the design of each project features local characteristics. For Nanchang Wanda, the company adopted blue and white porcelain as a design element. The Hefei project features local architectural styles.
In a speech at the opening ceremony, Wang Jianlin, chairman of the group, emphasized that all the amusement equipment in the park had been designed by Wanda.
According to the project, a yearly family ticket for the outdoor theme park costs 1,588 yuan for the parents and one child. A family ticket, which admits one parent and one child, is sold at 345 yuan for the aqua park and cinema park together at peak time.
The group is targeting the culture and tourism sector in line with its planned business transformation. After Shanghai Disneyland opened this summer, Wang claimed his projects would keep Shanghai Disneyland from making a profit for 20 years.
In a report released by Wanda Group, culture and tourism income reached 29.03 billion yuan in the first half of this year, up 57.1 percent, compared with a decline in the income of the housing segment, which recorded a fall of 17.3 percent from the same period last year.
