Chinese tycoon Wang Jianlin, which opened on Saturday the first amusement park of your Wanda Group, said an unlikely cultural and commercial war against Disney, a few weeks before the opening of a Disneyland park in Shanghai.
Presented in a lavish ceremony, this "Wanda City" 2 km2, located in Nanchang (southeast), includes a huge shopping center with interactive movies, a theme park of 80 hectares, equipped with "the highest roller coasters and fast "China and a vast aquarium.
The project represents an investment of 22.000 billion yuan (3.353 million dollars), according to a statement from the group, which hopes to attract more than 10 million visitors per year.
Versus "invasion" of foreign cultures, "we want to be a model (...) and affirm the strength of the influence of the Chinese in the cultural field," said the founder of Wanda in the opening ceremony of the park, according CCTV state television reported.
A week earlier, Wang - China's richest man according to Forbes magazine - had openly appointed his adversary: the US giant Disney entertainment, which will open in mid-June in Shanghai its first park in mainland China, after an investment of 5,500 million dollars.
"The craze for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (...) happened, the time in which we imitated blindly Disney ended years ago," Wang said in a lengthy interview on CCTV.
- Tiger against Wolves -
Wanda wants to compete with Disneyland with alternatives "local color". After Nanchang, the Chinese group plans to build six more parks in China, in medium-sized cities in the next three years and reach 15 by 2020.
"We want to act so that Disney can not be profitable in this sector (of amusement parks) in China in 10 or 20 years," Wang Jianlin insisted.
"A tiger can not fight a horde of wolves," he said in the interview, before castigating the trend of Disney to "clone its products in the past without innovating".
He also criticized the climate of Shanghai ( "too rainy in summer") and high prices of the entrance to Disneyland: up to 499 yuan (68 dollars), double the price for access "Wanda City" Nanchang.
In fact, the prices charged by Disney have been criticized by Chinese netizens on Weibo microblog platform.
However, Wanda goals seem very ambitious, according to experts, who criticize the lack of experience of the Chinese group.
Otherwise the US group, which is based on the franchise of its popular theme parks. The Shanghai Disneyland park will be the sixth group, and the fourth built abroad, after Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
In China, Disney will build on its franchises and its characters, very famous in this country, to seduce a rapidly expanding middle class in a country where he performs an increasing part of their film revenue.
Disney is not the only company that wants to establish itself in the lucrative Chinese leisure market. Hollywood studios Universal Pictures and DreamWorks also have plans to build theme parks in the country.
"Disney gets significant revenue from the rights of his films. The benefits of their parks are actually quite low," said China Securities, in a note cited by Bloomberg. "It is precisely the intellectual property which lacks the Chinese promoters".
No comments:
Post a Comment