Update #7 - Bank Bytedance, iQiyi, and the Film Industry
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Bytedance Applies for Singapore Digital Banking License 🏦
Bytedance, the company best known for creating TikTok, has applied for a banking license in Singapore. They have partnered with the Lee family of Singapore, owners of a significant stake in OCBC Bank, the second largest in the country.
The Singapore Monetary Authority plans to issue five digital banking licenses by the end of the year. Several other companies such as Alibaba’s Ant Financial, Grab and Xiaomi are also competing for a license.
Bytedance has massive ambitions — on top of their well known products in video, social media, and news, their most recent ventures have been in gaming and education.
iQiyi’s New Hires = International Expansion 🌏
iQiyi is one of the largest, yet less well known video platforms from China. They are listed on the Nasdaq, have 100+ Million users, and could be considered to be something like the Netflix/Youtube of China. Given their relatively unknown global image, their recent hires have gotten less attention in the international press than Bytedance’s hiring of Kevin Mayer from Disney.
But iQiyi has recently poached Netflix’s VP of Public Policy Asia, Kuek Yu-Chang and a former BBC executive Kelvin Yau to run their Thailand office. This is all part of iQiyi’s broader plan to expand their business internationally. In December 2019, iQiyi CEO Gong Yu described his plans to have half of his paying subscribers to come from overseas within five years.
If you think about TikTok (owned by Bytedance), Zynn (owned by Kuaishou), and iQiyi, I think we are seeing a trend of Chinese companies actively seeking and succeeding in foreign markets. It’s kind of natural that you would look overseas for growth, but this was a less obvious choice for the previous generation of Chinese tech companies. It’s a sign of the times.
13,000 Chinese Film Companies Now Out of Business 🎞
A recent report indicates that 13,000 Chinese film and TV companies have gone out of business this year, significantly more than 2019. Around 70,000 movie screens across China were shut down because of the Coronavirus and the overall film industry is expected to lose 30 Billion yuan (~$4B USD) in revenue this year.
This comes after movie theatres were allowed to reopen at the end of March, then very suddenly got shut down again a few days later due to new Covid-19 cases. As of today, movie theaters are still closed.
If we remind ourselves that China felt the effects of the Coronavirus a few months before the West, we can potentially predict what will eventually happen in the West a few months from now. So far, no major film studios (to my knowledge) have gone bankrupt in North America or Europe, but let’s wait and see what happens in the near future…
I wrote an article a few months ago about major Chinese films skipping their theatrical release, going straight to digital, and specifically choosing to host their content on platforms like Bytedance. This happened in January because of the Coronavirus, and we saw Disney/Universal do something similar in the West a few months later in April.
