Fosun Tourism Group - the tourism and leisure service arm of Shanghai-based conglomerate Fosun International - announced on Tuesday annual sales revenue of about 17.34 billion yuan ($2.47 billion) for the fiscal year ending Dec 31, 2019, up 6.6 percent from a year earlier.

The Hong Kong-listed tourism company, better known as Foliday, saw the business volume of its tourism operations up 8.9 percent year-on-year in 2019, topping 14.59 billion yuan. The group's profit attributable to shareholders spiked 97.4 percent year-on-year to reach 608.7 million yuan.

Over the past three years, Foliday's compound average growth rate was 21 percent and adjusted EBITDA was 81 percent on a like-for-like basis.

The board of Foliday proposed to declare a final dividend of HK$0.02 ($0.0025) per common share for the year ending Dec 31, 2019. Together with the interim dividend, the total dividends for the year came at HK$0.09.

Club Med, the global resort brand which Fosun acquired in 2015, saw its sales revenue up 5.2 percent year-on-year to 13.2 billion yuan. Foliday's first tourism destination project, Atlantis Sanya which officially opened in April 2018, saw its sales revenues up 74.2 percent year-on-year to reach 1.31 billion yuan.

The company still managed to register solid growth in the first two months this year amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. For the two months ending on Feb 29, the business volume of Foliday's resort operations increased 8 percent year-on-year and its EBITDA was up 20 percent from a year earlier.

As of the end of last year, Foliday had total cash and cash equivalent of approximately 2.1 billion yuan and unused bank loan facilities amounted to about 2.5 billion yuan, which will provide sufficient proceeds for the company's business development, Foliday said in its fiscal report.

Foliday's chairman Qian Jiannong said the epidemic has pointed to three major opportunities in the tourism industry of the future. In the first place, the transformation and upgrade of the tourism industry will accelerate, especially the transformation from sightseeing to leisure tourism. Second, the industry will undergo a round of reshuffling, which will be translated into mergers and acquisitions. Third, business intelligence and online operations will be more widely used among tourism companies.