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Thomas Graziani · · 8 min readHow Alibaba is shaping the Chinese entertainment industry
Alibaba has been growing in the entertainment business with an aggressive acquisition strategy since 2014.
This article will cover the following topics:
- Alibaba’s entertainment business structure
- Alibaba Pictures
- Taopiaopiao
- Damai
- Youku Tudou
- UCWeb
- How Alibaba links entertainment with ecommerce
- Competitors (Tencent and Baidu)
What comprises Alibaba’s entertainment empire?
Alibaba Pictures
The film company was formerly called ChinaVision Media, of which Alibaba Group bought a majority stake in late 2014.
Alibaba Pictures invests in local and international movies and owns a major Chinese movie ticketing app (Taopiaopiao), which managed successful hits such as “A Dog’s Purpose.” The movie only scored US$64 million in the US, but US$88 million in China. And since Alibaba’s acquisition of ChinaVision Media, the latter saw an explosion in its revenue.
However, the company is struggling with profitability. Alibaba Pictures as a whole recorded a net loss of RMB 1.4 billion (~US$200 million) in 2017, and the situation seems to be getting worse.
Its content production segment earned a meager profit of RMB 4.1 million (~US$600,000) in 2017, which is still a significant improvement from last year’s RMB 244 million loss.
How does Alibaba link entertainment with ecommerce?
Domestic competition
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