Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group Co (萬達集團) yesterday signed a US$3.5 billion deal to buy Hollywood studio Legendary Entertainment, the maker of blockbusters Jurassic World and Godzilla, dubbing it China’s biggest-ever cultural takeover.
Legendary’s film productions have grossed more than US$12 billion worldwide at the box office, according to a Wanda statement. The company’s projects — which have also included Pacific Rim and the latest Batman trilogy — are mostly the big-budget action spectaculars popular with Chinese audiences.
The agreement was “China’s largest cross-border cultural acquisition to date,” said the Chinese firm, which is headed by the country’s richest man, Wang Jianlin (王健林).
Photo: AP
“American movie companies have the commanding heights of the movie industry in the world,” Wang told reporters at the signing ceremony in Beijing, adding the acquisition will “change this situation.”
The takeover has echoes of Japanese electronics group Sony Corp’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures in 1989, which epitomized the then-booming Asian country’s purchases of trophy US assets.
However, Wang denied that the deal — which comes weeks after Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) bought Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper — was intended to increase Beijing’s cultural influence.
“Government soft power belongs to another sphere,” he said at the briefing, where he and Legendary chairman and CEO Thomas Tull watched lawyers sign the agreement. “I mainly focus on business interests.”
Wanda, founded by Wang, has its origins in commercial property, but is diversifying into areas ranging from entertainment to e-commerce as the world’s second-largest economy matures and growth slows.
The Legendary deal is the latest in a string of overseas acquisitions by the firm, including the organizer of Ironman extreme endurance contests and Swiss sports marketing group Infront. It also has a stake in Spanish soccer club Atletico Madrid.
Wang burst into the international spotlight in 2012 by buying US cinema chain AMC Entertainment for US$2.6 billion. His company owns more than 200 malls, shopping complexes and luxury hotels across China.
The conglomerate said this week that its revenue surged nearly 20 percent last year despite worsening economic conditions in its home market.
Even so Wang called it a “miracle” that a Chinese firm could “acquire such a big and heavy American company” as Legendary.
The deal will make Wanda’s movie unit “the highest revenue-generating film company in the world,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts