CTG DUTY-FREE surged 5%. On the first day of closure in Hainan, the amount of duty-free shopping off the island rose by 61% year-on-year.

On December 19, Haikou Customs released statistics showing that on December 18, the official first day of island-wide closures at Hainan Free Trade Port, off-island duty-free shopping amounted to 161 million yuan, with 24,800 shoppers and 118,000 purchased items, marking year-on-year increases of 61%, 53.1%, and 25.5%, respectively. According to a report by the Sanya Daily, on the first day of the closure, Sanya's duty-free sales achieved outstanding results, with a total city-wide duty-free sales amount reaching 118 million yuan.

Industrial Securities believes that the new city center duty-free stores opened intensively between Q3-Q4, implementing a strategy of duty-free drainage and tax-inclusive supplementary layouts to cover the entire customer flow. Meanwhile, the optimization of off-island duty-free policies, as well as port and city duty-free policies, further expands the store coverage radius, taps into customer bases, widens the sales range and product categories, and simplifies some approval processes, contributing to incremental sales. Currently, the chip structure in the duty-free sector is relatively good, with a fundamental bottoming and rebound, and there are still policy catalysts expected in the future.