China Duty Free Group, which last year became the world’s largest travel retail company by sales turnover, has released financial results showing its total revenue for the first half of this year reached 35.50 billion yuan ($5.49 billion), an increase of 83.85 percent over the same period last year. Meanwhile, net profit rose by 484.12 percent to 5.44 billion yuan ($841.74 million).

The company’s management attributed this growth mainly to Hainan Province’s duty-free policies driving massive domestic travel retail sales boom and China’s effective control of the pandemic simultaneously making it possible for people to travel and shop domestically.

The group currently operates 194 stores covering more than 90 cities on mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Cambodia. Its Sanya International Duty Free City on the tropical island of Hainan is the world’s largest single travel retail complex in terms of sales area, and saw sales revenue of 21.35 billion yuan ($3.3 billion) last year. In 2020, the group accounted for 22.6 percent of the global travel retail industry’s market share, according to a Frost Sullivan report.

A fortnight ago, the company submitted an application for a secondary listing in Hong Kong, which is expected to raise between $7 to $10 billion.