Kintetsu's Abeno Harukas flagship jumps 20% in September, but the chain's total sales fall

Kintetsu Department Store said sales at its flagship floor inside Abeno Harukas, Japan's tallest building, rose 20.1 per cent year on year in September — the seventh consecutive month in which every department at the store outperformed the year before — according to the company's own sales flash dated October 1. Across the chain's eight branches combined, sales fell 5.3 per cent from a year earlier.

Kintetsu attributed the Abeno Harukas result to strong footfall from a regional-produce fair, the "Dai-Hokkaido Exhibition," which it said generated the store's best sales since Harukas opened, alongside a related regional-revitalisation event themed around Tokushima prefecture. Both domestic and inbound sales were strong, the company said. By category, confectionery sold well on Silver Week gift-giving demand, while a cooler spell lifted thin knitwear, cardigans and autumn-weight jackets in womenswear; a newly opened brand's first weeks "greatly exceeded" its sales target, and personal-shopping sales and related in-store events for that clientele also performed well, Kintetsu said.

Kintetsu's other eight branches — Uemachi, Higashi-Osaka, Nara, Kashihara, Ikoma, Wakayama, Kusatsu and Yokkaichi — each posted individual gains of between 3.5 and 6.5 per cent in September. Even so, the chain's combined total fell 5.3 per cent, a figure that includes the effect of the February 28 closure of its Nagoya store; stripped of Nagoya's year-earlier result, the comparable existing-store total was still down 3.6 per cent, the company said.

The split matters more than the blended headline figure. Kintetsu's growth is increasingly concentrated in a single flagship — a department store built around Osaka's tallest tower, with the tourist draw and event-driven footfall that implies — while the rest of a mid-size regional chain, even when every branch is growing on its own terms, is not offsetting the scale lost to a closed branch. That is the shape Japan's department-store sector is taking more broadly: fewer, larger, experience-led flagships carrying groups that are quietly shedding smaller regional floors.

What to watch is whether that formula keeps working once Abeno Harukas's run of record-setting events slows, and whether Kintetsu's remaining eight branches — each growing, but each small — can ever add up to enough to lift the group total back into positive territory on their own.