E-Mart Co., South Korea’s biggest discount chain operator, said Tuesday that it will open its first Vietnamese store next year and expand the total number of stores in the country to 14 by 2017.

To that end, E-Mart has formed a strategic tie-up with Vietnam’s 7th largest conglomerate U&I Group and signed a preliminary deal with Savills Vietnam Co., a unit of British real estate agency Savills, for bilateral cooperation, the South Korean company said.

“Our foray into the Vietnamese retail market is attributable to the saturated local retail market,” an E-Mart official said.

The discount chain operator of South Korea’s No. 2 retailer Shinsegae Group started looking to Southeast Asian countries in recent years after it suffered losses in China.

E-Mart, which opened a store in Shanghai in 1997 for the first time as a local retailer, has reduced the number of stores in China to 16 from 27 over the last two years due to their cumulative losses, according to the sources.

The company estimates it lost some 94 billion won ($87 million) in China in 2011. (Yonhap News)