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Property developer Bliss Group on Tuesday opened the Ambon City Center, the largest shopping mall in the Maluku capital, as it seeks to tap growing business potential in the eastern province.

“We believe in the next five years Maluku province, especially Ambon, will become a promising business center for Indonesian investors,” Isaac Bliss Tanihaha, chairman of Bliss Group, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Isaac said the Ambon City Center mall will be home to projects including hotels, housing, schools, hospitals, sports stadium. It might also include a convention center. The statement did not provide the size of the investment in the mall.

A decade ago, Ambon was the site of sustained violence between the city’s Muslim and Christian population.

While those tensions have eased, last year several people were killed when violence again flared following a petty dispute.

Isaac founded Bliss in 2002 in the United States and mainly developed property in the Southern California area.

Bliss’s roots go back to 1980, when it established the Surabaya Delta Plaza shopping mall, the statement said. The Ambon City Center mall is Bliss’s first project in Indonesia after a hiatus from the local business.

The two-story mall will be home for retailer Hypermart, which is owned by the Lippo Group, with which the Jakarta Globe is affiliated.

Isaac said the Ambon City Center is expected to discourage the city’s residents from traveling to Makassar, South Sulawesi, to buy consumers goods such as processed foods, clothes and electronic products.

The lack of retail options in Ambon prompts many people to travel the 900 kilometers across the Banda Sea to Makassar.

The Indonesian government has plans to turn Maluku, home to 2.4 million Indonesians, into a hub the for manufacturing of both fish and coconut products.

Eastern Indonesia, including the regions of Papua and Maluku, has long been less developed than western parts of the country.

According to data from Central Statistics Agency (BPS), the Maluku and Papua regions account for a combined 2.1 percent of the nation’s economy in 2011, down from the 2.4 percent contribution the previous year.

The Maluku economy grew by 6 percent last year, slowing from the 6.5 percent expansion pace in 2010, according to data from the regional statistics office.

Growth in the Maluku is forecast to reach 5.7 percent this year.