Wuhan, Saturday, 13 September 2025.
Fantawild Group drew 85.7 million visitors in 2024—surpassing Merlin, Universal and Chimelong—a single data point that forces a recalibration of global operator sets. For retail and leisure executives, the number signals a faster domestic recovery and capacity-led scale in China, with direct implications for licensing strategy, JV structuring, capex allocation and guest-flow engineering. Expect immediate pressure to adjust attendance forecasts for Asia, revisit IP monetisation tactics, and prioritise scalable operations, dynamic pricing and season-pass models tuned to very high-volume markets. Investors should factor divergent recovery curves and asynchronous capex cycles into underwriting for new parks and hotels. Operators expanding overseas need deeper localisation and partnership playbooks rather than simple brand export. Practical next steps include reweighting competitor pools to include large Chinese players, stress-testing guest-capacity assumptions, and modelling revenue-per-visit at scale. Fantawild’s figure reframes 2025 planning assumptions for anyone betting on global park growth.
A disputed data point that demands attention
Industry discussion this weekend centers on a reported attendance figure of 85.7 million visitors to Fantawild Group in 2024 — a number presented as exceeding several major international operators. The precise source for the 85.7 million figure is not included among the materials supplied for this article; therefore the figure is cited here with an explicit uncertainty flag [alert! ‘no primary attendance source provided in supplied documents’] while noting that Fantawild is repeatedly listed among the largest global operators in market summaries [2][3].
Where Fantawild sits in global operator sets
Even without an independently supplied audit of the 85.7 million claim, multiple industry overviews place Fantawild among the handful of China-based groups that materially change the composition of the global peer set — alongside names such as Chimelong and other large domestic players [2][3]. For context on the incumbents that Fantawild is compared with, a recent industry write-up highlights Universal’s global attendance figure as 60.8 million in its cited comparison, and reiterates Disney’s much larger scale (142.1 million in 2023), emphasising the magnitude gap operators face when benchmarking against legacy Western players [1].
If Fantawild’s reported scale is confirmed, licensors, international IP holders and potential joint-venture partners should treat Chinese large-scale operators as tier-one counterparts when structuring overseas deals or licensing arrangements. Market research and analyst notes underline APAC — and China specifically — as a dominant and fast-growing component of the global amusement-park market, which changes bargaining dynamics for IP owners and service suppliers [3][2]. This implies more sophisticated revenue-share terms, territory carve-outs and multi-year capacity commitments will be required when negotiating with large Chinese groups [3].
Operational lessons: capacity, pricing and seasonality
High-volume operations demand different playbooks for guest-flow engineering, dynamic pricing and season-pass models. Industry market analyses recommend operators pursuing growth in high-volume markets focus on digital queueing, scalable F&B and retail systems, and season-pass strategies tuned to large, repeat domestic audiences — guidance drawn from broader market trend reporting rather than a single-park case study [3][2]. These operational priorities are the practical steps suggested for firms that must ‘stress-test’ capacity assumptions in Asia and beyond [3].
Investor and capital-allocation consequences
For investors underwriting new parks, hotels or attraction portfolios, a materially larger Chinese operator footprint means forecasting must explicitly model asynchronous recovery curves and divergent capex cycles between China and Western markets. Market-size and forecast reports highlight the region’s outsized share of growth and advise recalibrating assumptions on revenue-per-visit mix, ancillary spend and integration of resort assets when valuing projects in APAC [3].
Competitive benchmarking and expansion playbooks
Operators planning overseas expansions should prioritise deeper localisation, stronger local partnerships, and flexible IP strategies rather than simple one-to-one brand exports — a takeaway grounded in recent commentary on competitive dynamics among global operators [1][3]. That commentary also notes the intensifying competition among major media-backed operators (for example, Universal expanding aggressively as a challenger to Disney), a pressure that shapes strategic choices for market entry and alliance building [1].
What to do next — practical steps for executives
Practical, immediate actions for retail and leisure executives include: reweighting competitor pools to include major Chinese groups when benchmarking; stress-testing guest-capacity and queueing scenarios for very high daily throughput; modelling revenue-per-visit at scale; and revisiting licence and JV term sheets to reflect larger domestic bargaining power [3][2]. These operational and financial adjustments align with broader market intelligence that places Asia, and China in particular, among the fastest-growing and strategically consequential regions for the sector [3].
Bronnen