(Yicai Global) July 12 -- Even after remaining king of the hill in Asia as well as long occupying the fourth spot within the global industry, Overseas Chinese Town Ltd. (OCT) [SHE:000069], now facing fierce competition, is striving for vigorous expansion nationwide and seeking new business lines to earn more profits.

Relying for many years on its tourism + real estate model to build tourism cities by gaining access to land, OCT formed a mutually-complementary trend with production functions and profit means, and solved problems of short-term cash back-flow and long-term continuous profitability.

However, amid the current unprecedented tug of war, storming the group's ramparts has become not too difficult. Therefore, OCT must seek to find new drivers of growth to maintain its current industrial presence, or even move forward by diversifying product lines, shed the 'tourism + real estate' boundary and rev up the model competitiveness of its business. OCT ranks fourth among global theme parks, next to those of Walt Disney Co. [NYSE:DIS], Merlin Entertainments PLC [LON:MERL] and Universal Studios Inc., multiple annual reports jointly released by the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) and US-based AECOM Group Inc. [TO:ARE] show. The number of visitors a theme park welcomes determines this ranking. OCT is followed by Chinese counterparts like Guangzhou Chimelong Group Co., Fantawild Holdings Inc. and Songcheng Park Performance Development Co. [HK:300144]. Fantawild further clinched fifth place last year, right after OCT, the latest data published by TEA and AECOM indicate.

In 2015, OCT proposed the new strategic concept of culture + tourism + urbanization to participate in the reform of state-owned enterprises and start investing in and restructuring  local state-owned assets. In 2016, based on original tourism + real estate and culture + tourism + urbanization models, OCT added a compensation model of tourism + Internet + finance,'hoping to promote the tourism industry with Internet-plus and nurture the tourism industry with finance. As the cultural tourism and real estate markets have strong regional characteristics, it is necessary to constantly employ a distributed layout to grow. In 2017, OCT extended its range to Yunnan province, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, central China, and Xian, Shaanxi province, embarking on a phase of wild expansion.

Over the next 5 to 10 years, OCT investment in the country will reach USD147 billion (CNY1 trillion), said Duan Xiannian, general manager of OCT Group.

"It is indeed necessary for OCT to do so. The model of real estate and urbanization guided by cultural tourism was originally OCT's advantage. However, as more and more participants enter the market, OCT's advantage will weaken. OCT must grab the market and increase its distribution before the whole market cottons on,' Song Ding, director of the Tourism and Real Estate Research Center of China Development Institute, told Yicai Global.