Chapter 230 Profits from Cultural Business

Among the four comics in this "Weekly Shonen Magic", Dragon Ball, Pokemon and Transformers are becoming increasingly famous in later generations.

But comics tell stories, and stories need to be expressed bit by bit, and it also takes enough time to build up a reputation among comic fans.

It is impossible to become popular in the entire market instantly like a video game.

In fact, when Dragon Ball was first released in its previous life, although it was not a flop and had certain sales, it was still far from being a hit.

It was not until the "First Martial Arts Tournament" was held that the story reached its climax and subsequent publicity was also in place, which created the reputation of the best-selling comic in RB history.

As for Pokémon and Transformers, they had a certain appeal in the early stages, but it was impossible for them to soar to the top in history overnight.

The most fundamental reason why “Weekly Shonen Magic” was able to immediately achieve sales of hundreds of thousands was that it was well promoted and had already left a mark in the hearts of young people.

Sun Lina continued, "Boss, the person in charge of Jiekou Bookstore, Naota Taro, sent me a fax saying that the Yokogawa Printing Factory, which produces our RB comics, is gradually unable to keep up with the demand for our comics. He wants to know when our printing factory in Hong Kong can start production."

Liu Zhicheng said, "Send a fax to Naota Taro later. The factory in Hong Kong will take on certain production tasks for RB. However, in the short term, you should ask him to continue to maintain the cooperative relationship with RB as the OEM factory."

The industrial park in Yuen Long has already had a printing factory, but the scale of the printing factory is relatively small and the group's internal business is busy.

But this printing factory can be said to be the largest one since the founding of Hong Kong.

During the construction, a total of 6 of the world's most advanced color printing production lines were imported from Germany. If fully operational, the total printing capacity can exceed 30 comic books a day.

But he was also responsible for the packaging and printing of Orange Technology's products, and all of a sudden he had to use a lot of space to print the comic weekly.

Although a new factory has been built in the mainland, it also undertakes other businesses, so RB comics printing still relies on RB's OEM factory for the time being.

Of course, if its printing factories operate at full capacity, according to the estimated production capacity, it will exceed the demand of the RB market in the short term.

But RB is only the largest comics market in Asia, not the only one. You should know that Hong Kong has a population of 500 million.

The comic weekly published by Yulang International once had an average sales volume of 100,000 copies per issue, which was quite high proportionally.

Some countries in Southeast Asia may not be as economically comparable to RB and Hong Kong, but they have a large population base, with several countries having a population of over 100 million.

Although there are also a lot of piracy problems, Liu Zhicheng will not let go of these markets.

As early as when Orange Technology Company expanded its channels in Southeast Asian countries, it had already established relations with a group of local businessmen.

These people were rich and powerful in their own countries. Liu Zhicheng handed over the local distribution rights of the comic weekly to them. The two parties cooperated, one providing a product that could make money, and the other providing a channel that could operate normally. Both sides benefited from the strong cooperation.

However, of course, I have to be responsible for the printing of the comics myself, and the factory in Hong Kong is mainly responsible for this production task.

At present, the factory can still keep up with the sales speed, but Liu Zhicheng still ordered to continue building the second phase of the factory in the mainland.

The scale of this phase is twice that of the first phase, and plans to introduce 10 production lines to increase production capacity to 200 million books per day.

It is naturally difficult to meet this production capacity by relying solely on the sales of one comic, but Liu Zhicheng has a large number of other classic comics in his mind.

For these comics, he only needs to provide an opening and the plot of the entire story, and naturally there will be countless cartoonists under him to complete the subsequent creation.

These comics can be added together to form several weekly, biweekly or monthly magazines, and the comics market can also be expanded to European and American countries.

And every comic, once it has been serialized for a few months and the amount of content has reached a certain level, can be published as a single volume, which is another extremely huge market.

In the past, Dragon Ball's single volumes sold a total of 4 million copies, and some other classic comics also sold in the billions.

Therefore, Liu Zhicheng is not worried at all that the expansion of his factory will cause overcapacity.

On the contrary, in the next few years, the printing factory may have to expand further to meet the needs of the comics market.

However, due to production quality control factors, the expansion of the factory was decided to be done step by step.

"I never thought that this small comic book could generate such a huge benefit and create jobs for tens of thousands of people."

In the office, Sun Lina looked at the data in the document and Liu Zhicheng's introduction, and couldn't help but sigh.

“So don’t underestimate the inadvertent things in our lives. The most profitable things in the world are these products that everyone needs.

Although Hong Kong's real estate industry has hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in investment at every turn, it can only be viewed from a narrow perspective. In terms of revenue and profit, it is still far behind some international consumer product giants.

Moreover, the current comic weekly only brings in direct revenue. When the company becomes famous in the future, the various toys, dolls, models, figurines and other peripheral products will be the real profit." Liu Zhicheng said with a smile.

"Does the toy company also need to expand the production of these peripheral products?" Sun Lina asked.

Sun Lina knew that comic-related products also had high profits, so she naturally paid close attention to them.

Liu Zhicheng thought for a moment and said, "It's impossible for a toy factory to produce all kinds of toys. We should outsource toy production as much as possible and only make the highest-end toys ourselves."

"Okay, I'll arrange it when I get down." Sun Lina nodded, then turned and left.

Liu Zhicheng looked at the departing figure and said: Don’t forget that there are two men at home.

……

In RB, although Jiekou Bookstore has stores in a large number of cities, the coverage of a single store is limited within the city.

If it is an electronic product, when it is attractive enough, many people can queue up overnight and wait for the store to open.

For example, in the early 21s, countless Apple fans set up tents and lined up in front of Apple stores across the country in order to get the latest iPhone.

But comics are different. Instead of waiting in line at the door for so long, it is better to wait for your friends who have already bought the comic books to finish reading them before giving them to you.

This is also the weakness of book products. For customers, they are one-time products and cannot attract readers to hold them for a long time.

Therefore, when customer demand is not met, the sales of comics will hit a bottleneck, which is determined by the number of terminal sales stores. In order to maximize sales, Naota Taro quickly contacted some other bookstores.

After learning about the astonishing sales of Weekly Shonen Magic, these bookstores were naturally willing to cooperate. In this world, no one can resist money.

As for the overseas markets, although the total amount is not as large as the RB market, it also has a large number of fans in Southeast Asia.

The Chinese, in particular, are also very keen on comic stories. For example, in Hong Kong, which has a population of only 500 million, the sales of Feng Yun Comics reached copies during its peak period.

Chinese people are spread all over the world, and Taiwan's population is as high as 1800 million. Even though the average income is lower than that in Hong Kong, it has a large base, so Japanese and Hong Kong comics also have a certain market here.

Other Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and others had already begun to recover their economies in the 80s.

The total population of these countries is as high as hundreds of millions, among which there are also many Chinese, as high as tens of millions. Many Chinese are even at the top of the business pyramid and control all walks of life in these countries.

Weekly Shonen Magic began to gain fame in RB, and this also attracted the attention of many book distributors in Southeast Asian countries.

These people make a living from this and are very concerned about the development of RB comics. Once a popular comic is released, they immediately think of introducing it to their own country.

After learning that the ownership of the comics belonged to a Hong Kong company, many Southeast Asian distributors came to Hong Kong with the intention of obtaining the distribution rights for several comics.

Magic Weekly's comics are not only published in RB, but are also published simultaneously in Hong Kong and neighboring Taiwan, using traditional Chinese characters.

Before the rise of the mainland, traditional Chinese characters were more commonly used by overseas Chinese around the world.

These Chinese distributors can directly understand the comic weekly magazines from Hong Kong and are naturally aware of their quality.

After consulting Liu Zhicheng, Sun Lina did some research and found some people with some background and ability to serve as short-term distributors.

The Southeast Asian market is also a huge market, but if it is ignored for a long time, it will be very easy for pirated interest groups to form locally.

By cooperating with some powerful distributors in Southeast Asian countries, we can all get what we need, make the pie bigger together, and then share it together.

For a product like comics, the most important thing is the initial plot. With attractive elements and sufficient advertising, it can quickly enter a stage of rapid development.

Dragon Ball, Transformers, and Pokémon can all be considered good plots in this age of scarce spiritual entertainment.

For ordinary young people, the three completely different world structures still have a strong appeal, and the subsequent stories are a continuation of the classics and gradually reach a climax.

Weekly Shonen Magic has been on the RB market for more than a few months, and the story of Transformers has reached its climax. The new metal life has washed away people's worldview again and again.

Among the Pokémon, various Pokémon with different super powers have aroused the fantasies of countless Japanese otaku.

Taro Naota quickly calculated the total sales of the latest issue: 202 million copies.

In the RB market, the price of comics is 300 yen, which is equivalent to about 6 Hong Kong dollars.

The printing cost in Hong Kong is about HK$1.5 per issue of comics, which is then sold to a tax avoidance company registered in Bermuda for HK$1.7. This company then sells it to Jiekou Bookstore for HK$3.5.

After paying import duties, transportation costs and domestic taxes, Jiekou Bookstore can make about HK$0.5 per book. If it goes through other bookstores, it will have to give up part of the profit.

In general, at present, just in the RB market, the net profit of a weekly magazine is about HK$2.5.

Based on current sales, the company's profit for each issue is HK$500 million, and the annual profit is as high as HK$2.5 million.

Is it too much?

Not much actually!

A piece of land in Hong Kong could earn several times more than this in times of non-economic crisis.

Currently, the annual rental income of a building in Central may be able to reach this amount.

Fortunately, this is only the profit of the RB market. After several months of market incubation, some orders from Southeast Asian countries have gradually increased, and even doubled. Even the sales in Hong Kong are about to exceed 20 copies.

At the beginning of the cooperation, several major distributors ordered a total of 20 copies for safety reasons. We will bring these back to our own country to see the results before deciding on the next step.

Sun Lina readily agreed. The contract price signed between City Group and these dealers was a tiered agreement. The better they sold, the higher the discount from the Hong Kong factory. This could be considered as an encouragement for them to have enough motivation to promote "Weekly Shonen Magic".

Due to cultural differences, Liu Zhicheng does not plan to fully promote his comic weekly in Europe and the United States, but instead plans to directly publish English-language versions of the single volume in the future.

In the future, when several comics are adapted into animation, they will also use this method to enter the European and American markets.

After confirming the distributors in Southeast Asia, there are only two tasks left. One is to continue to produce the comic plot, and the second is to start printing with full efforts.

It’s just that the Southeast Asian region cooperates with local businessmen, so the profit of our own company may be slightly lower, but it can still reach 2 Hong Kong dollars per book.

By the end of the month, the company's statistics showed that the total sales of each issue of the comics had reached 360 million copies, and the net profit of each issue was as high as 800 million Hong Kong dollars.

By this calculation, the annual profit is 4 million Hong Kong dollars, but the sales of comics will increase, and with the increase in fame and the development of IP, the huge profits will far exceed the current level.

In less than half a year, a comic book company in Hong Kong has become one of the top ten comic book publishing companies in the world, with sales volume second only to the three major comic book giants in the United States: Marvel Comics, DC and RB.

And this is just the beginning. As more and more comic books are published in weekly magazines, the publication of single volumes has also been included in the plan. An English version will also be added this time, mainly in preparation for entering the European and American markets.

Especially in the United States, there are countless comic mysteries. Transformers and Dragon Ball once caused a craze in the United States market in the past.

In this beautiful country with a population of 3 million, even if a very small number of people become fans, that will be a huge number.

The printing factory of Orange Technology has implemented a policy of 24-hour production with no downtime for all machines.

At the same time, Liu Zhicheng generously ordered 20 printing production lines from RB and Germany, preparing to build a new factory in the mainland.

(End of this chapter)