This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on February 27, 2018 - March 5, 2018

KUALA LUMPUR: Sunway Pyramid in Petaling Jaya saw a record customer traffic last year, registering a 5% year-on-year growth in the number of cars entering the mall, amid cautious consumer sentiment, disruption in e-commerce and the opening of more new malls in the Klang Valley.

Sunway Malls chief operating officer Kevin Tan cited Sunway Group chairman and founder Tan Sri Dr Jeffrey Cheah’s foresight to take proactive steps to ease vehicular traffic congestions within Sunway City and Subang Jaya as one of the reasons for the positive increase in traffic to multiple reasons.

“Tens of millions were spent to construct a new flyover, which flows traffic from Kesas into Sunway City with ease. More millions were then spent to widen the New Pantai Expressway (NPE) roads leading to the Kewajipan roundabout, thus reducing congestion and freeing up the NPE road in front of the mall,” he said in a statement.

“The flyover and road expansion were funded by Sunway as part of its community service to visitors of Sunway City. Sunway also contributed substantially to the bus rapid transit, providing the community a cleaner alternative public transportation within Sunway City,” he said.

Tan said there is also a plan in the pipeline to ease the congestion due to weaving traffic in front of the gateway entrance to the mall.

He also attributed the higher traffic growth to the increased parking capacity with the addition of the mall’s new wing, Sunway Pyramid West. Currently, the mall has some 10,000 parking bays integrated with Sunway Resort Hotel and Spa, Sunway Pinnacle and other Sunway business units nearby.

“We see ride-hailing as another key driver that positively contributed to the increase in footfall of the mall. The popularity of ride-hailing services such as Grab and Uber is a plus factor providing alternative transportation to the mall without taking up our car park bays. It is estimated that these ride service arrivals is as high as 20% of the mall’s average car arrival,” said Tan.

The mall also had a proliferation of non-shopping offerings expanding relative to shopping offerings with the growing trend on food and beverage (F&B), and leisure spending.

“The demand for F&B over the last few years had been so significant that 25% to 30% of the today’s malls’ leaseable area is now catered to this trade category. Years ago, F&B took up less than 10% of the malls’ overall leased space.