Owner Karl Kwok Chi Leung Headquarters Hong Kong Area served Hong Kong Parent organization Wing On Co International | Divisions Wing on Bank Founded 1907 Key people Kwok Lok, Kwok Chuen | |
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Industry retailing ( cosmetics, fashion, home appliances, luxury stationary, ivory craft, kitchen wares and appliances, etc) Founders Kwok Lok (郭樂), Kwok Chuen (郭泉), Kwok Chuen, Kwok Lok Profiles | ||
Wing On (Chinese: 永安) is a department store company in Hong Kong.
Contents
The company is owned by a Hong Kong listed company Wing on Company International Limited (SEHK: 0289), incorporated in Bermuda. The holding company of the listed company itself is Wing on International Holdings Limited, which is owned by Karl Kwok Chi Leung (郭志樑) and the Kwok family.
History
Brothers Kwok Lok (郭樂) and Kwok Chuen (郭泉) started the Wing on fruit store in Australia in 1897. In 1907 they returned to Hong Kong with accumulated savings and founded the Wing on Company, the second Chinese-owned department store in Hong Kong.
They later went on to found Wing on Bank.
Stores in Hong Kong
It has five outlets in Hong Kong, with 310,000 square feet (33,400 square metres) of shopping space:
The branch at the Wing on Centre was prominently featured in the climactic sequence to the 1985 Jackie Chan film Police Story.
Wing on in Shanghai
Wing on also had a branch in Shanghai. The Shanghai branch was opened in 1918 on Nanking Road (today's Nanjing Road), and was at the time one of the "big four" department stores of Shanghai. The store occupied two prominent buildings. The distinctive original building stood opposite from the (then) Sincere Department Store. An extension was built next to it in the 1930s, one of the first modern "skyscrapers" of Shanghai. After the Communist revolution in China (1949), the store was nationalised, traded under various names and no longer connected to Wong on in Hong Kong. The 1930s extension building houses a separate "Overseas Chinese Store", which, for many years, was one of the few places in Shanghai where people with overseas connections could spend their foreign exchange certificates to buy goods not available to ordinary Chinese consumers.
In 2005, the department store in the original 1918 building resumed the Chinese version of the Wing on name (Chinese: 永安; pinyin: Yǒng'ān). However, the store is owned by a separate company to Wing On, called "Yongan Department Store Co Ltd", a state-owned company. This company does not use the "Wing On" name in its English translations. The exterior of the original store was restored to its appearance during the Wing On period. However, the interior has been drastically refurbished. The store has also changed its market orientation, focusing almost exclusively on domestic Chinese branded clothing targeted at visitors from other parts of China, with a small department in watches and other accessories.