HONG KONG -- Lotte Mart Co., South Korea‘s third-largest discount chain store, plans to open a new store in a city in north-central China, as part of an effort to boost its presence in the country’s fast-growing retail sector, regional government and business sources said Wednesday.

Lotte Mart has agreed with the Henan provincial government to invest 500 million yuan ($78.6 million) to build a discount store in Zhegzhou, the capital city of Henan, official sources said.

The announcement comes as the Henan province is scheduled to hold a four-day fair on Henan-South Korean Cooperation and Exchange, starting Friday. The event is the first international economic and trade fair to take place in the Chinese province.

The chain, run by South Korea’s largest retail conglomerate Lotte Group, said it will increase the number of its stores in China to 300 in six years. It currently operates 82 stores in the world’s most populous country.

Lotte Mart has been revving up its expansion in China since the acquisition of Dutch wholesaler Makro’s stores in Beijing and Tianjin in 2007.

The company will push ahead with its expansion plan starting this year and will open three stores each in the provinces of Hebei, Jilin and Liaoning and eight stores in the eastern region of China, company executives said.

China will soon become a strategically important market for Lotte Mart, following South Korea, they said. Its overseas stores, the majority of which are in China, posted 2.6 trillion won (US$2.4 billion) in sales last year, compared with South Korean sales that hit 5.9 trillion won.

Leading global retailers, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Carrefour SA, have built up their businesses in China as the country’s fast moving consumer goods market has seen recent annual growth at a two-digit rate.

In 2010, China’s fast-moving consumer goods market posted a 16 percent increase to 726 billion yuan (US$110 billion), market research firm CTR said.

Some market watchers predict that China will surpass the United States as the largest consumer market by 2020 with retail sales expected to reach $2.4 trillion.

Wal-Mart is the largest hypermarket operator in the country with a share of about 8 percent, followed by China’s CR Vanguard Group with 6.5 percent. Carrefour ranks fourth with a 5 percent share.

(Yonhap News)