Retail Sales - is brazilian retail really underpenetrated by malls?

Brokerages and Investment Banks often use an argument to strenghten their potitive prospects on the brazilian mall industry, on ML´s Carlos Peyrelongue´s words: "the low penetration of shopping malls within total retail sales in Brazil, coupled with decreasing unemployment, rising salaries, and credit expansion, should allow for material growth of existing malls and green field projects over the next few years". Although not very important, this argument embeds a distortion. In the US, there are strip malls (picture follows), that are accounted as malls and that work properly there because the urban distribution is much different from Brazilian´s. There are suburbs in the US, and the drive away from the city centres makes land cheaper, allowing for horizontal mall configurations. Therefore, little street shops are aglutinated into small, spreaded malls, that drive those statistics up. In Brazil, cities are very dense, and land more expensive. Therefore, malls tend to be more vertical, and strip malls less economically viable. To conclude, this underpenetration argument loses a lot of its appeal.