China Is The Fastest-growing Film Market In The World
$BIDU, $BABA
“Film used to be B2C (Business to Customer) business, but now Internet allows the industry focus on customers”, Michael Ellis, Asia-Pacific President and Managing Director of the Motion Picture Association, said Thursday.
Mr. Ellis made the statement at the 2015 US-China Film Summit held in Los Angeles by Asia Society Southern California.
“With 480-M online people access in videos, the influence of big internet companies like Baidu, Alibaba (NYSE:BABA), and Tencent are important in film and television industry,” Mr. Ellis said, predicting that China’s office box sales will surpass that of the United States by Y 2017.
China has the fastest-growing film market in the world, with the box office revenue increasing by 48% Y-Y in 1-H of Y 2015. The figure reached the Y 2014 sum of US$4.8-B, as of early September and is expected to hit around US$6.5-B at the year-end.
The Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) owned Iqiyi Motion Pictures, for example, has already invested or participated in over 40 movies in its less than 2 years of establishment.
According to Li Yansong, president of Iqiyi, 50% of the ticket sales this year have so far been from online e-Ticket sales, exhibiting a trend that moviegoers tend to get film information through the Internet, which helps them to decide whether to watch a movie or not.
On film promotion, Li noted that in the past few years, about 80 to 90% of the promotion budget had been used for outdoor advertisements, but right now most companies put half of their promotion budgets in online advertisements.
To Gao Qunyao, Vice President of Wanda Cultural Industry Group which runs the AMC (NYSE:AMC) cinema chain in the United States, the Internet has been a “revolutionary” force that has changed the original B2C model of China’s film and television industry, and has made people in the business focus more on their consumers, whom they never paid attention to before.
“For Wanda cinemas, if you look at the ‘Golden Week’ in October, more than 17% of the movie tickets are sold online via mobile devices,” said Gao.
By Song Miou
Paul Ebeling, Editor
HeffX-LTN
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