Aeon brings a smaller, cheaper shopping-centre format to Vietnam's Red River Delta
Aeon Vietnam will open its tenth retail property and first Red River Delta shopping centre on 3 October, in a Hai Phong City ward whose old provincial name — Hai Duong — the project keeps even after 2025 boundary changes erased it from the map.
Aeon Vietnam will open Aeon Hai Duong Shopping Center on 3 October, the company's tenth retail property in Vietnam and, according to its own 10 September announcement, its first shopping centre in the Red River Delta region. The address the release lists is Tac Coi ward in Hai Phong City — not the province the project's name refers to. Hai Duong was a separate province bordering Hai Phong until a 2025 restructuring of Vietnam's provincial boundaries folded it into the port city; the shopping centre appears to have kept the older place name even after the administrative map around it changed.
The project is the third in a smaller-format shopping-centre line Aeon Vietnam has been rolling out to reach smaller cities faster, following Aeon Tan An Shopping Center last year and Aeon Mall Da Nang Thanh Khe in July, the company said. Total floor area runs to about 38,100 square metres, with 26,000 square metres of leasable space — a fraction of the size of Aeon's flagship regional malls around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City — and Aeon put the trade catchment at about 330,000 people within a 15-minute drive.
Inside, Aeon organises 37 specialty tenants and its own retail floor across three storeys into five zones it calls Food, Kids & Entertainment, Fashion, Beauty & Wellness and Living, under what the release calls a "three-generation family" concept. Anchors include an Aeon supermarket, a Kids Republic children's floor, and Aeon Beta, a cinema brand making its first appearance inside an Aeon shopping centre, according to the announcement. Aeon Vietnam, which developed the site itself, said the centre will employ about 900 people.
The format bet is straightforward: rather than repeat the capital-intensive, 100,000-square-metre-plus regional malls Aeon has built around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the company is testing a cheaper, faster-to-build footprint for provincial cities — the same instinct that has pushed rivals such as Central Retail and Vincom deeper into Vietnam's smaller cities as the biggest metro areas fill up. A 330,000-person catchment is a fraction of what Aeon's flagship malls draw, so this format's economics depend on running lean rather than on sheer footfall.