Sunac Cultural Group announced an announcement to announce the strategic holding investment in Dream City Culture.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account: ACGx(ID:acgxclub), Author ACGx.
Movie is an important part
On August 21, Sunac Cultural Group announced an announcement to announce the strategic holding investment in Dream City Culture.
Dream City Culture is a well-known animation IP incubator and commercial operation company in China. This time, Sunachuang Culture will invest in, diversify and invest in the production and production of film and television content, including short video. , animated dramas and cinema movies.
Before, Rongchuang took over the entertainment and acquired Wanda Oriental Film City and 13 Wanda Travel City.
In the plan of Sunac’s comprehensive entry into the cultural market and the layout of the cultural tourism industry, there is still a lack of a nation-wide IP network that can form a long-term cultural and creative content system to connect to the offline paradise, theme parks and other cultural tourism industries.
According to the successful experience of the development of the travel industry at home and abroad, the animation IP is obviously the most suitable.
In the Chinese animation industry market, the Dream City, which has been established for 10 years and has multiple IPs, is clearly a suitable investment target for Sunac Culture.
Returning to the development of the City of Dreams in the past 10 years, for this company with multiple animation IPs, Sunac is strong and has a strong offline layout. The employer.
The Dream City plans a few years of A-Chou movies, perhaps not far away.
Five-year loss of 60 million, Dream City regains brand marketing
Compared with the profitability of foreign lines, Hello Kitty and other expressions and images, it is not difficult to find that brand licensing is the most important profit model for mature animation image IP compared to advertising, publications and derivatives sales.
As the earliest company in the commercialization of anime expression IP in China, the Dream City, which was established in 2009, apparently owed the bonus of brand authorization.
With this wave of dividends, there are three investments in the City of Dreams from 2011 to 2013.
The hotbed of the IP emoticon in the anime emoticon, and the pressure of capital, let the dream city choose to increase the investment in the end of the sales link – not only the creation, operation and brand authorization of the content such as book animation, but also Including derivatives development and sales, online online storesShop and offline store operations, Dream City even tried the development of self-developed games.
The company that started with content creation, especially for the company whose dream image IP is the origin of the dream city, expands the downstream derivative market, integrates the upstream and downstream industry chain, and looks at the Chinese entertainment market five or six years ago. Come, it is actually a relatively normal operation.
However, the final revenue situation of Dream City also reflects the fact that the development of online entertainment in the Chinese entertainment industry in the past few years is indeed unsatisfactory.
In 2016, Dream City landed on the New Third Board to announce its earnings report. The entire industry discovered that the company has been losing money since 2013.
In 2013, the net loss was 7.272 million yuan, the net loss in 2014 was 14.639 million yuan, the net loss in 2015 was 18.244 million yuan, the net loss in 2016 was 10.324 million yuan, and the net loss in 2017 was 10.18 million yuan. In the 5 years, the dream city culture lost a total of 6000. Million.
In an earlier interview with other media outlets, the founder of Dream City, the “Father of the Beaver” Hans, he mentioned that the main reason for the loss was the downstream derivative of Dream City, including Taobao. , Tmall, offline, personnel training and expansion, and so on.
In order to cope with this series of losses, from the end of 2016 to 2017, Dream City chose to lay off employees and sell assets to reduce the burden.
Through the announcement of the New Third Board, we saw that Dream City not only sold the copyright of its non-first-line animation image, but also sold the stake in the sugar family, disposed of the shareholding of the long-held comics of the original holding subsidiary, and cancelled the Ningbo and Wuhan. And the Dream City branch of Shanghai and the three places.
In the Beijing and Shanghai and other places, many raccoon stores have also closed most of them.
By streamlining operating costs, closing some companies and selling part of the equity of some associates to recover investment income, Dream City greatly reduced the scale of losses in 2018, and obtained operating income of 54.82 million yuan and net profit of 4.23 million yuan. , achieved the first profit after 5 years.
At the same time as the burden reduction, Dream City is still promoting brand transformation.
As the most important IP of the entire company, all the brand transformation of Dream City is based on the raccoon.
In the Chengdu, we will build a raccoon field park, and in the first-tier cities of the country, we will launch the theme exhibition in the raccoon happiness station, and open a theme café in Beijing. The dream city has been focusing on the downstream of the industrial chain in the IP operation of the avatar-based animation image. Transforming to focus on offline brand marketing.
The basis of brand marketing is still the extension of content.
IP stratification with different content targeting, using movies as a key to refreshing public awareness
The animation film director @MTJJ Wood, which will be released on September 12th, said on Weibo that the investor behind the film will completely hand over the dominance of the work to him. Considering the relatively small characteristics of the series of animations in Luo Xiaohei, the target audience of animated films is similar to that of serialized animated audiences, that is, Luo Xiaohei animation fan groups of ten to twenty years old.
Hans announced in 2016 that the animated film “A Castle of Dreams” will be dominated by Vision’s “big children”, namely fans and children’s audience.
For an anime expression IP that has no storytelling, it is necessary to create new people with new content creation, and realize the authorization and cooperation of IP. To make an all-age work is the most suitable for the IP.
At the beginning of 2018, Dream City and Tencent Video collaborated on the animation “Little Deer Almond” for 3-6 year old preschool children. It is also looking forward to expanding its peripheral derivative products with children’s animation works to realize commercial authorization. One try.
It can be seen that Dream City has carried out a more detailed user age layering of its anime IP.
Whether it is Luo Xiaohe liked by teenagers, a raccoon facing fans and children, and almonds designed for preschool children, the common features of these anime images are cute and cute, and they have great advantages in commercial licensing. .
A series of anime image licenses that have been popular in China have actually been a lot colder in recent years.
On the one hand, it is derived from the old-fashioned animation image, and its content marketing has not changed correspondingly with the rapid development of the Chinese entertainment industry. On the other hand, the emerging new animation image has gradually replaced these old-fashioned animation images and become The new darling of brand cooperation.
So, whether it’s Luo Xiaohe or Ashi, for these mature anime IPs, it’s possible to refresh these anime IPs in the emerging crowds by attracting more people’s attention through larger movies. understanding.
However, for the City of Dreams, the most influential brand and the heaviest IP component of the A-City movie were not released in 2017.
According to the prospectus published by VisionChina in 2017, VisionChina’s investment in “A Castle of A Helmet Dream” is 24 million and is expected to be released in 2018 or 2019.
Now that there is a shareholding in Sunac Culture, perhaps the production schedule of “The Castle of A Beaver Dream” will speed up a lot.
In the image of the brand to be expanded, relying on the film to achieve crowd expansion and commercial authorization, Dream City must find a suitable IP for its animation image IP.Content entry point.
In foreign countries, the Angry Birds and the IP operations of Dream City are similar.
In the case of a sharp drop in heat, Rovio made an animated film for Angry Birds, and through the film to promote commercial authorization, access to mobile game users to reverse the company’s temporary revenue crisis.
However, in the following year, Rovio once again intensified competition in the mobile game market, and the user acquisition cost increased sharply, resulting in a stock price decline.
The “Furious Birds 2” movie released this year is a big movie, and the “Rage Bird” is hard to fly high.
Although the IP of the imaginary image of Dream City and the type of business of Angry Birds are different, for the copyright owners behind it, the short-term popularity of the film may bring staged business. Authorized benefits, if you want to go this way for a long time, you need a solid, long-term word of mouth marketing and continuous content investment.
In the Chinese animation market, the animation IP that can achieve this is really not much.