J. Front Retailing's flagship department stores spent August losing foreign shoppers even as the ones who came kept spending more, then watched both trends flip hard in the first two weeks of September.
A duty-free reversal in real time
At Daimaru Matsuzakaya, duty-free sales fell 0.9% year-on-year in August as the number of tax-free shoppers dropped 22.1%. Those who did show up spent 27.2% more per visit, a sign that fewer, higher-spending travellers are carrying the tax-free counter. Strip out the Umeda store and the picture looks stronger: duty-free sales up 5.3%, customer counts down a milder 10.8%.
Then the pattern reversed. Through September 14, Daimaru Matsuzakaya's duty-free sales rose 36.9% year-on-year (43.6% excluding Umeda), with customer counts up 1.8% and spend per customer climbing 34.5%. J. Front's disclosure lists strong duty-free sales as one of the factors behind the improved store-level figures through September 14. Whatever the cause, the change happened inside three weeks, and the company's own figures run only through September 14, so a partial-month rebound is not the same as a full-month trend.
| Metric | August (group) | August (ex-Umeda) | Sept. to 14th (group) | Sept. to 14th (ex-Umeda) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duty-free sales (YoY) | -0.9% | +5.3% | +36.9% | +43.6% |
| Duty-free customer count (YoY) | -22.1% | -10.8% | +1.8% | +12.2% |
| Spend per duty-free customer (YoY) | +27.2% | +18.0% | +34.5% | +27.9% |
Umeda keeps dragging on the total
None of this offsets the continuing hit from the Osaka Umeda store. J. Front says the store's shrunken sales floor and the loss of last year's Expo 2025 venue-related sales pulled department-store group sales down 1.9% year-on-year in August; excluding Umeda alone, sales rose 2.7%. Umeda's own August sales fell 45.9% year-on-year. Across the whole department-store segment, including tenant income, revenue was down 0.8% in August but up 3.6% with Umeda stripped out.
PARCO is the bright spot
J. Front's shopping-center arm told a different story. PARCO tenant sales rose 8.6% year-on-year in August, with 13 of 15 stores ahead of last year. The Nagoya region, boosted by the HAERA facility that opened June 11, led with a 22.0% gain, followed by Sapporo PARCO at 18.7%, Hiroshima PARCO at 15.9% and Shibuya PARCO at 15.1%, the last driven partly by anime and game merchandise and PARCO Theatre ticket sales.
Elsewhere, the developer business, the JFR Card payment and financial unit, and the Daimaru Kogyo wholesale arm all reported lower revenue in August, the company said.