China will be the world's fastest-growing entertainment and media market over the next five years, with a 12 percent annual growth rate on average, followed by Brazil, according to a research report released by US auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Shanghai yesterday.
China passed Germany in 2011 to become the country with the world's third-largest entertainment and media revenues, deriving from advertising and consumer spending, and it will keep the position until 2016, the report said.
The boom in the entertainment and media market is based partly on the fact that China has the largest consumer base in the world, but government support and positive market sentiment have also helped, Pan Zhenyu, a partner in PwC China, told the Global Times yesterday.
The Ministry of Culture in February released a cultural development plan, which highlighted the country's goal to double the output of the culture industry by 2015.
The government invested 117 billion yuan ($18.5 billion) in the cultural sector in the first five months of the year, up 28.2 percent year-on-year, the National Bureau of Statistics reported Saturday.
Meanwhile, the sentiment in the cultural market has been growing positively. Total private equity investment in the sector amounted to 52.81 billion yuan in 2011, business information provider ChinaVenture reported on April 25.
PwC said that China's entertainment and media growth will be primarily led by two factors: the number of Internet users, which rose by 32.1 percent year-on-year in 2011, and the film market, which expanded by 22.1 percent in 2011. Their growth was much higher than that in other sectors like TV and broadcasting, which only recorded one-digit growth rates.
China has the world's most Internet users, who amounted to 513 million in 2011, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. "That will be a big driver for China's growth in the Internet market," You Tianyu, a media analyst at consulting firm iResearch told the Global Times.
The number of digital screens in China is projected to rise to 10,030 by the end of 2012, an annual increase of 35.39 percent, while China's box office revenues are expected to reach 19.98 billion yuan this year, up 48.99 percent year-on-year, according to a report issued by entertainment consulting firm EntGroup Inc this month.
"China will remain the world's second largest film market in terms of its number of digital screens and box office revenues this year," said Liu Cuiping, a consulting manager at EntGroup.
China has agreed to import 14 US films in 3D or IMAX formats annually in addition to the current quota of 20 revenue-sharing foreign films.