Fujairah gets its skates on with mall development

An ice rink is set to open in Fujairah this year as one of the country's biggest mall developers completes a major new shopping centre.

Emke Group, the retailer behind LuLu Hypermarket, will open a 60,000 square metre mall in the centre of Fujairah city in the fourth quarter of this year, joining Majid Al Futtaim (MAF) in building and opening a major shopping centre in the emirate.

"There's good growth in Fujairah," said Raja Abdulkhader, the director of Line Investment and Properties, part of Emke Group. "There are people moving in as well as a lot of tourists coming in. What is specific here is that we are going to have an ice rink." He added Emke was in talks with operators, but no company had yet been appointed to manage the rink.

The new mall, to be called Galleria, is being built as an extension to an existing LuLu Hypermarket. "We have been here more than 10 years and we have always thought of an extension," said Mr Abdulkhader.

Galleria is being built at a cost of Dh200 million (US$54.4m) and will include 110 shops, a food court, restaurants and another anchor store that is yet to be determined.

Investment in Fujairah is slowly growing as a long-awaited oil pipeline from Abu Dhabi to the emirate is expected to be completed as early as next year.

The pipeline will carry up to 1.5 million barrels of oil per day when operational, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, which has become a contentious stretch of sea as tensions between Iran and the West mount over Iranian nuclear ambitions.

David Macadam, the head of retail for the Middle East and North Africa at Jones Lang LaSalle, said the increasing oil investment in Fujairah was good news for the emirate's economy and newest malls. "Fujairah is now the major new oil terminal for the UAE that will spur growth in population," he said. "The ice rink is not so much for tourists, it's for the local population to enjoy. They will not have to go to Dubai to try it."

MAF, which has six malls in the UAE, opened its first mall in Fujairah last week with 105 stores, 34,000 sq metres of retail space and Carrefour Hypermarket as its anchor. The Al Safeer Group of Companies is also set to open Century Mall in the northern part of Fujairah city, with more than 100 stores.

Mr Abdulkhader said LuLu Hypermarket in Fujairah had reported growth in sales of 20 per cent in the past two years and that the supermarket now attracted 10,000 visitors daily.

Mr Macadam said competition for retail in the emirate would be healthy despite the big increase in the number of stores this year. "I think there will be many that explore the MAF mall," he said. "But I think Fujairah is quite value conscious. It will be interesting competition [between] malls."

rjones@thenational.ae