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.