ng Kong cents for much of the past year, lagging both the broader Hang Seng and a Hong Kong specialty-retail peer group that returned close to 80 per cent over the same period. Against that backdrop, a tripling of profit is the first evidence in a long while that the turnaround is real. Sa Sa closed its entire mainland offline network by the end of June 2025, absorbed the exit costs, and kept only its online business. The discontinued Mainland stores had dragged the prior year into an HK$54 million loss.  This year, with the stores gone, that loss shrank to a negligible HK$2.2 million. Stripping out a HK$54 million drain does an enormous amount of work in a company that earns HK$200 million. The continuing mainland operation, which is now purely cross-border e-commerce through Tmall, Douyin, JD.com and its own WeChat mini-program, swung to a HK$9.1 million profit even as its revenue slipped 5.4 per cent. The real engine of the recovery, though, is home. Hong Kong and Macao now account for almost 80 per cent of the group’s turnover, and the region delivered HK$209.2 million in segment profit, up nearly 63 per cent. Same-store sales across the two markets rose 18.9 per cent, with Macao’s outlets posting a striking 29.7 per cent. Transaction counts, average spend per visit and the number of items in each basket all climbed together. When every one of those moves in the same direction, it points to real demand. The uplift in performance was mostly attributed to the tourism rebound. Hong Kong drew close to 50 million visitors in calendar 2025, with non-mainland arrivals jumping 16 per cent and double-digit growth from Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia and the Middle East. Tourists accounted for 54.1 per cent of Sa Sa’s offline sales in the territory, up from 47.6 per cent a year earlier. According to the company’s filing, the city’s push to stage concerts, sporting events and conferences has helped improve sales in the beauty sector.  Southeast Asia is still in the red Meanwhile, Southeast Asia’s turnover grew 16 per cent to HK$486.7 million, and its online business surged 41.3 per cent. However, the unit still posted a HK$14.8 million loss as Malaysia’s expanded sales-and-service tax squeezed consumers and Sa Sa’s cost base. Same-store sales were negative in the first half, then recovered. Management is running the region asset-light, with the Singapore business steered out of a Kuala Lumpur office and only five stores left on the island. Positive note Sa Sa entered the new financial year with momentum on its side. For the quarter from April 1 to June 21, 2026, group turnover rose 24 per cent, with Hong Kong and Macao offline sales up 32.5 per cent. However, Mainland online fell another 18.1 per cent as Sa Sa culls underperforming platforms and total online turnover actually dipped. The growth is overwhelmingly an offline, tourism-fed Hong Kong phenomenon. Sa Sa has done the hard, unglamorous work that the market stopped expecting from it: Cutting a chronically loss-making business, tightening costs and restoring the dividend in full. The reward is a lean and profitable company.  After this many false dawns, the burden of proof has shifted. For the first time in years, Sa Sa has handed its doubters a set of numbers genuinely worth arguing over. Further reading: Why Sa Sa’s recovery is not a return to the old tourist retail model.