tions of its predecessors, Aeon 1 in the city centre, and Aeon 2 in the northern district of Sen Sok.  Aeon Meanchey is the largest of the three, weighing in with a leasable area of 98,000sqm. (Aeon 1 has 68,000sqm and Aeon 2 has 85,000.) The official grand opening will take place in the first half of 2023, with no firm date currently having been announced. The location of the new mall ensures that Aeon gets a slice of the booming and until recently under-retailed southern section of Phnom Penh strung out along the north-south-running Hun Sen Boulevard. The area, which not long ago was somnolent, is now a hotspot for development and is attracting all kinds of property investment, including residential, industrial, mixed-use and retail projects.  Competition in the retail space is set to become intense: Aeon Meanchey’s launch comes hard on the heels of September’s soft opening of Chip Mong 271 Mega Mall, just over five kilometres to the north, and others are in the pipeline. The edutainment mall Hardly any company in Asia that opens a new mall wants to call it a mall or a shopping centre anymore. Most are at pains to differentiate their projects from that so-20th century concept where people came to buy stuff and occasionally plonked themselves down in a food court to refuel.  That particular conceptualisation fell out of favor with the growth of e-commerce, when mall owners realised that without strong differentiating features their projects risked becoming obsolete. So the creative types in the mall marketing departments put their thinking caps on and started linking the names of new malls with gimmicky descriptors.  Thus, in this instance, Aeon Meanchey isn’t a mall, it’s an “edutainment mall”.  The project has four levels and approximately 250 tenants. Collectively, the mall and tenant employees number approximately 5,000. Cars are accommodated with 3,200 spaces, and motorbikes — the staple of transport for Cambodians — with 1,850.  Being a retailer as well as a shopping centre brand, the centre is anchored, like Aeon 1 and Aeon Sen Sok, by one of Aeon’s own massive department stores, which sits on two levels and covers an area of 16,000sqm.  The lower, ground floor part of the store is where the food is: there’s a supermarket, cafe and delicatessen offering about 400 different Asian dishes. Also on the ground floor of the department store is Cambodia’s first Glam Boutique, a concept offering third-party beauty brands grafted onto Aeon Wellness, Aeon’s own health and wellness concept. Aeon Wellness sells a variety of private-label health products, many of them Japanese. Both Glam Boutique and Aeon Wellness are well established in neighboring Vietnam, where there are eight stores. Sitting atop the food on the upper floor of the store is a wide range of department store general merchandise, featuring Aeon’s private label goods and third-party brands in apparel, home fashion, outdoors, kids, and other categories. In keeping with the mall’s emphasis on edutainment, the store also features Kidzooona (yes, there are three ‘o’s, that’s not a typo), an amusement park concept that was launched in Japan in 2010 by Aeon Fantasy, a company that operates a variety of kids’ play concepts in Aeon malls. That’s not all for kids either, who can enjoy an outdoor park on the third floor and then descend to the second floor below on a slide. Before the children get on the slide, they, along with their families, can enjoy the Sky Bridge, a 40-metre long glass construction offering a spectacular and highly photographable view of the inside of the building. Design and technology are notable features of the mall and the digital installations are both large and high-impact, projecting scenes from nature that the company says is all original content. Other special features at the mall include a 1900sqm special events hall on the second floor with a capacity of 3000, and a 250-metre walking track, not a bad amenity in a city where walking for health is often a thankless task because of broken pavements, heavy traffic and oppressively hot weather. Aeon’s ASEAN strategy Aeon is one of Japan’s most established mall and retail operators, and despite an ambitious renovation program for existing projects, growth upside in its native country is somewhat limited.  Sales growth has been weak there and accordingly the company’s growth strategy is focused outside the country, particularly in China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. To complicate matters though, China became problematic in 2022 as well because of periodic forced closure of Aeon’s malls as part of covid lockdowns. The company wants to have more than 50 malls up and running outside Japan by the end of 2025, but so far it has 35, with 22 of them in China. The China malls accounted for 65 per cent of leasing space and 70 per cent of the overseas operating revenue in the first half of this year. In ASEAN, Aeon has thrown down significant markers in both Cambodia and Vietnam. In Cambodia, it competes at the big end of the mall business with Chip Mong, which like Aeon is both a property developer and a retailer that operates its own supermarkets, convenience stores and other formats. However, outside the capital itself, Cambodia is relatively small potatoes in terms of development potential, given that the entire population outside Phnom Penh is less than 15 million. In contrast, Vietnam is a big prize because of its huge population of almost 100 million. Aeon operates six malls there, including two each in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The others are in Haiphong, and the other one in Binh Duong, just north of Ho Chi Minh City. It has announced the development of six more, in Hanoi, Thanh Hoa, Thua Thien-Hue, Binh Duong, Danang and Dong Nai. The goal is to have 16 malls operating in Vietnam by the middle of the decade. How many more it can squeeze into Cambodia is not certain, but for now it is throwing its weight around in Phnom Penh, and giving the Cambodian capital a credible platform for attracting global brands.