London is top target for international retail – CBRE
New research from CBRE indicates that London is the world’s top destination for international retail businesses. The firm looked at 326 of the world’s top retailers across more than 200 cities and found that London attracted more than half of all the international retail brands surveyed.
With 55.6% of the brands surveyed present in London, the UK’s capital is the outright number one city in the firm’s annual How Global is the Business of Retail? survey, after sharing the top spot last year with Dubai. CBRE says London benefited from a mini-boom last year, as tourist spending boosted a “relatively robust” local economy. It remains a key hub for retailers that want to expand into Europe.
Retailers have responded to economic uncertainty by de-risking their expansion plans, the firm says, and are choosing markets such as the UK that are regarded as safe havens. The UK overall remains the most penetrated global country in the survey, with 56.7% of retailers in the survey established here. Peter Gold, head of EMEA Cross Border Retail at CBRE, says that once international retailers have set up a presence in the UK, usually through retail property in London, they are willing to extend their reach into other major UK cities and major regional shopping centres such as Trafford Park, Meadowhall and Bluewater.
The other top international retail centres in the survey following the UK and Dubai were New York, Moscow, Paris and Hong Kong.
Peter Gold noted that US fashion retailers in particular continued to make strategic advances into the UK last year, which he says they find an easier market in which to establish their brands than other European markets thanks to shared language and cultural characteristics.
