Tourists check out in a duty-free shopping mall in Sanya, south China's Hainan Province, Sept. 30, 2023. As a popular tourist destination, Sanya is seeing a tourism boom during the National Day holiday. Photo: Xinhua

As South China's Hainan Province plans to implement independent customs operations throughout the island by the end of 2025 in a bid to further boost the opening-up of the Hainan Free Trade Port, DFS, an international luxury travel retail specialist, has voiced strong confidence in China's efforts to establish a world-class free trade port with distinct Chinese characteristics, signaling a clear willingness to collaborate.

"DFS Group is highly optimistic and eagerly anticipating Hainan's upcoming implementation of independent customs operations throughout Hainan island. Sanya is the third largest city in China for luxury goods consumption, following Shanghai and Beijing," Nancy Liu, president of DFS China, told the Global Times on Thursday.

DFS is a global leader in luxury travel retail, and part of the LVMH group, the world's largest luxury group.

It has a partnership with China Trade News, a news agency under the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), and they hosted a meeting on Thursday focused on jointly promoting the development of the Hainan free trade port and accelerating its transformation into a world-class free trade port.

"China's central government has set an exciting vision for the Hainan Free Trade Port to achieve and it aims to pilot deregulation in a phased approach," Liu said, stating that DFS' involvement in the Hainan Free Trade Port reflects its commitment to sharing insights and collaborating with the Chinese government and other stakeholders on this key national initiative.

Hainan is committed to accelerating the development of international tourism and consumption by fully integrating favorable policies into the tourism sector, and it aims to establish itself as a world-class travel destination.

Since the implementation of Hainan's electronic tax payment system for duty-free shopping in May, high-frequency transactions have been fully transitioned online, with mobile remote supervision becoming increasingly advanced. 

"Building an international tourism and consumption center is a key mission assigned to Hainan by the central government," Huang Bin, deputy director of the Guoyan Economic Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday. "Hainan must align and integrate international best practices in areas such as market access, competition rules, cross-border flows of capital and talent, as well as tax systems," Huang said.

Liu emphasized that Hainan is more than just a consumer market. It serves as a strategic gateway and a testing ground for evaluating the direction and viability of entering the broader Chinese mainland market.

In the first three quarters of this year, Hainan's foreign trade reached 205.95 billion ($28.14 billion), up 20.2 percent year-on-year, outpacing the national trade growth rate by 14.9 percentage points during the same period, according to data from Haikou Customs.

During the same period, Hainan's exports reached 79.36 billion yuan, a 43.7 percent increase, while imports amounted to 126.59 billion yuan, growing by 9 percent.