Recently, according to a notice from JLL, a commercial real estate services and investment management organization, the company has obtained an exclusive sales mandate from IKEA’s parent company, Inter IKEA Group, to sell the IKEA self-owned, idle properties in eight cities—Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Harbin, Nantong, Xuzhou, Guiyang, and Ningbo—as a whole. This is the largest-scale centralized disposal of self-owned assets by IKEA in nearly 30 years since it entered the China market.

——IKEA has always bought the land and built the buildings itself. Last year it went on a frenzy of closing stores; this year, it’s also selling the buildings. But overall, it still doesn’t seem like a particularly good time—compared with Li Ka-shing, it’s worse by who knows how much.