Virtual Worlds Present Opportunities a Breakthrough

Figure: the IP of "Chinese hero" is licensed to Chinese Gamer International Corp. to develop the game.

Even with the pressure of "having to change", enterprises often look ahead and backward, and even enter the transformation dilemma of "taking two steps forward and one step backward". Facing the general trend of digital transformation, the traditional media industry has encountered more difficulties in management than ordinary enterprises. Guan jiancong, the managing director of cultural communication, has a deep understanding. Therefore, during the enterprise transformation, through the establishment of a special group with different partners, in addition to accelerating the transformation, it has successfully opened up more blue ocean markets\ Ta Kung Pao reporter Xu Lin

Q: Cultural Communication (00343) has the copyright of nearly 200 comic books, many of which are well-known works. However, entity comics have long been regarded as obsolete. How can the company transform and get its business back on track?

Guan: the cartoon industry is constantly changing, and many famous writers lament that their income is much lower than before in recent years. However, cultural communication has an enviable advantage, that is, it has a large number of IP (intellectual property). What we need to do is to activate these IPS first, which can be achieved from games, network platforms, and even NFT. The development prospect of virtual world is great. Business transformation is to find new value for these IPS in the virtual world.

Q: as managers of enterprises, what is the biggest difficulty they face in business transformation?

GUAN: employees' technology and vision are the key. Let the early comic writers understand that the digital transformation will bring them more opportunities; At the same time, we still need to constantly develop innovative IPS, which will show their value in digital form. New business development will seek suitable partners to reduce costs and explore business opportunities more quickly. For example, if we want to expand the computer game market, we need a lot of resources to start from scratch. Therefore, we licensed the IP of "Chinese hero" to China Netdragon, and the game finally received more than HK $700million in revenue, which was well received.

The so-called matrix organization in management refers to that an organization sets up a special task team for a special task, and the team can cooperate with the original organization. In the future, we will still explore more business opportunities in this mode.

Q: what are the current development plans?

Guan: we are planning to develop a meta universe platform like sandbox. There are a large number of IPS we have on the platform. The participants on the platform can interact with virtual characters such as dragon and tiger gate and Chinese hero. The lead painters are repainting new picture books for these characters with European and American painting style, and hope that there will be a special virtual currency on the platform, so as to add the element of "game fi", We will also launch NFT for characters. In fact, metauniverse and NFT are still a blue ocean market, and the future development space is very huge.

Q: when exploring the blue ocean market, what factors are the key to success?

Guan: To explore the blue ocean market is a "risky" strategy to some extent. To find out the blue ocean market, we need to go faster than others, but the key to success is not to go too far, which seems a little contradictory. A good example is that cultural messenger once worked with artist Jay Chou to develop a 3D interactive game social networking site ucan COM, but at that time, because we went too far, many technologies still failed to cooperate, and we encountered many difficulties in the development process. In fact, the concept at that time was exactly "meta universe", but the term meta universe had not yet emerged at that time. But up to now, the market has a certain understanding of the concept of meta universe, and there will be advantages in development, because we already have sufficient experience when we want to develop related businesses.

Q: there is parkinson's law in management, which means that after many years of operation, most enterprises will have "big enterprise disease", which means that the administrative structure will continue to increase like a pyramid. Everyone seems to be busy, but the organizational efficiency is getting lower and lower. How can managers overcome this problem?

GUAN: finding the most suitable partner for each project is more effective than increasing the number of people. For example, we plan to expand the mobile game market in the mainland. There is no doubt that mobile game manufacturers in the mainland are more familiar with the market demand than we are. However, to find a suitable partner, the key is that the knowledge complementarity between the two sides should be strong enough, otherwise the technology integration between enterprises will encounter obstacles.

Q: last year, we spent 63million yuan to acquire AI companies. What are our future development goals?

Guan: the acquisition of artificial intelligence company has advanced technology in Chinese speech recognition, which can be applied to office environment management and medical institutions at the same time. However, we hope that relevant technologies can eventually be applied to the automotive IOT, which is not only used to assist in driving vehicles. Like smart phones, the automotive IOT can also provide multimedia development, and ultimately better cooperate with our meta universe business.