IMAX Corp announced plans yesterday to open 75 more theaters in China within four years in partnership with Wanda Cinemas, the country’s largest theater operator, underscoring the Chinese movie industry’s rapid expansion.
IMAX, known for its large-format film technology, already has 45 theaters open in China and it expects to have 300 theaters operating in the country by 2016.
There was no disclosure of the monetary value of the expansion plans and profit-sharing deal signed in Beijing.
CEO Richard Gelfond said China is the company’s fastest growing market, and the deal means Wanda will be the single largest operator of IMAX theaters outside the US.
“Last year, we experienced record growth at IMAX ... Nowhere was our growth more evident than in China,” Gelfond said.
He added that the company’s box office revenues in China last year were 286 million yuan (US$44 million), a 10-fold increase from the previous year.
EPIC
Part of that stemmed from the conversion of Aftershock, a Chinese movie about the Tangshan earthquake of 1976, into IMAX format. That epic became China’s highest-grossing movie.
Gelfond said the company plans to do conversions of two upcoming movies, the patriotic Founding of a Party, and Hong Kong director John Woo’s Flying Tigers.
China’s fledgling movie industry remains relatively small compared to more developed markets like the US. The North American box office totaled US$10.6 billion in 2009, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
EXPANSION PLANS
However, expansion plans are rapidly under way. China’s Film Bureau said in a recent report that the country added 313 movie theaters and 1,533 new screens last year, for a total of just over 6,200 screens. The Chinese government has said it expects 20,000 screens in operation by 2015.
Wang Jianlin (王建林), chairman of the Wanda Group (萬達集團), said the partnership “will prove to be significant for China’s general movie industry.”
“Today’s strategic cooperation between our two companies is very important,” Wang said. “With Wanda providing the facilities and IMAX providing the technology ... more and more of the Chinese public will get the opportunity to experience this.”
China’s emerging middle class is showing a newfound enthusiasm for cinema. Last year’s blockbuster 3D epic Avatar, which also played on IMAX screens in China, drew enormous crowds willing to wait up to six hours in line for relatively pricey tickets.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to