Utour achieved a strategic cooperation with China Duty free Products Group and enters the duty-free market to expand the "tourism + shopping" layout

(25th Feb, 2020, Beijing) Recently, Utour Tourism Group and China Duty free Products (Group) Co., Ltd(herein refered as CDF)signed a strategic cooperation agreement. Both parties will rely on the advantages of CDF's domestic and overseas duty-free business advantages and Utour's comprehensive tourism service advantages to entirely integrate resources and jointly develop domestic and overseas tourism retail markets. Through investing in duty-free shops and tourism shopping retail stores, and etc., they plan to build a world-class tourism retail project with global competitiveness in China. This indicates that Utour has officially entered the field of tax exemption and shopping and serves as an important part of Utour’s "tourism + shopping" layout, Utour will innovate business models, further improve the comprehensive tourism service platform, and promote the launch of "from tourism to travel" developmental strategy.

Tax-free shopping is benefited from the favorable national policies and the overall upgrade of national consumption and now is ushering in a new round of high growth. CDF is the largest duty-free operator in China and has established long-term and stable cooperative relationships with more than 1,000 world-renowned brands around the world, it owns more than 240 duty-free shops with its sales channels covering multiple domestic hub airports and Asia-Pacific international airports and CDF Mall Haitang Bay. Annually, they provide tourism retail services to nearly 200 million domestic and foreign tourists.

As one of the largest tourl operators in China, Utour Tourism Group provides services of more than 2.1 million people yearly and has more than 10,000 cooperative tourism partners. Meanwhile, Utour’s travel retail business has already landed in 16 provinces, cities and autonomous regions over China. By the end of 2019, it owns more than 1,000 retail stores. After this cooperation is reached, Utour will complement CDF with its own traffic advantage and travel agency store channel advantages, delivering the outbound and domestic toursists to duty-free Store in a targeted manner to assist CDF to greatly expand domestic business. Both parties will carry out investment and operation cooperation in travel retail stores through various methods overseas. CDF has many advantages such as professional retail management capabilities, high-quality brand cooperation resources, and etc. Utour will provide support to investment and operation through store location, passenger flow, and category, and etc.

With the rapid growth of Chinese citizen tourism, especially the size of outbound tourist population, the user composition and market demand shows a diversified development trend. Utour's strategic positioning has gradually upgraded from "outbound tourism service platform" to "comprehensive tourism service platforms", which include tourism business platform, destination life service platform, education service platform, and immigration and real estate service platform. The business scope covers multiple fields like outbound tourism, domestic tourism, business association awards, Study Abroad, health care, sports tourism, immigration and real estate, currency exchange, destination services, and etc. In addition to the comprehensive tourism platform that directly provides services, Utour uses big data management and Internet finance as back-end support and plans to build a big data management and analysis platform and a tourism Internet financial platform to enhance the efficiency of the tourism services, analyze the demands of consumers, improve the completion of personal customer service, and to help customers solve financial problems involved in the transaction process. In the future, Utour will also deploy third-party payment and insurance business.

This march into the duty-free market is another major deployment for Utour in the field of "tourism + shopping" on the basis of its previous overseas tax refund business. It will further extend the industrial chain, create a better comprehensive tourism service platform and achieve the effective coordination and transformation of resources, customers, and channels.