2015年经济学人 百货商店 中式快餐（在线收听）

Department stores

Chinese takeaway

Old British brands get a lift in Asia

CLARKS shoes have more cachet with Chinese shoppers than with British ones.

DAKS, an upmarket British clothing brand, has two stores in Britain but sells through 43 in Asia.

Marks & Spencer is labouring to coax matronly Britons back into its shops, but plans to open 250 new ones overseas.

Now House of Fraser, a 165-year-old department-store chain, is to seek more growth and glamour abroad than it can find at home.

Yuan Yafei,China's joint 92nd-richest person, says he wants to “bring the House of Fraser to the whole China”.

Nanjing Xinjiekou, a department store controlled by his Sanpower Group, is to take an 89% stake, valuing House of Fraser at 450m($754m).

A complication is Mike Ashley, owner of the Sports Direct chain of sportswear shops (and of Newcastle United football club),

who snapped up an 11% stake in House of Fraser after Sanpower made its offer. His intentions are unclear.

House of Fraser is not a glittering prize. It is burdened with debt and a deficit in its pension plan.

The holding company that owns it reported a pre-tax loss of 8.2min the year ending January 2013.

Trading has perked up, thanks to online sales and popular own-label products. Last Christmas was its “best ever”.

But the layout of some of House of Fraser's 60 stores is “not ideal”, says Tony Shiret, a retail analyst at Espirito Santo Investment Bank.

It will take a lot of investment to spruce them up.

Department stores have suffered since the 1970s, when customers started driving out of town to buy big-ticket items such as televisions.

Harrods and Selfridges have firmly positioned themselves as purveyors of luxury goods.

House of Fraser, along with Debenhams and Marks & Spencer, occupy less elevated ranks between them and “fast-fashion” retailers such as Primark.

The “murky middle” is an uncomfortable place for most brands, says Allyson Stewart-Allen, a marketing consultant.

Grocery giant Tesco is losing market share to discounters and upmarket emporia; its finance director quit on April 4th.

Chinaoffers a fresh start (though plenty of British retailers, including Tesco, have found the going hard there).

Mr Yuan hopes that House of Fraser's British heritage and its royal warrant will entranceChina's burgeoning consumer class.

Hong Kong's Fung brothers made a similar bet by buying Gieves & Hawkes, a Savile Row tailor, in 2012.

Department stores may be past their prime inBritain, but inChinatheir sales will grow by more than 38% by 2019, predicts Verdict, a retail consultancy.

Mr Ashley's thinking is more difficult to discern. Does he hope to make a quick profit,

as he did in January after Sports Direct bought, and then quickly re-sold, a 4.6% stake in Debenhams?

(He has swapped his holding for the right to buy 6.6% of the retailer if its share price falls to a certain level.)

Perhaps he wants another outlet for flogging sportswear.

House of Fraser has challenged Mr Ashley's purchase, saying the seller should have offered the stake to other shareholders first.

In the 1980s House of Fraser was the subject of a histrionic row between a British tycoon,

Tiny Rowland, who coveted the company, and an Egyptian investor, Mohamed Al Fayed, who bought it.

The retailer hopes to sell itself more quietly this time.