Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) on Friday said it would take a stake in the US production company behind the Mission: Impossible and Terminator series, marking China’s latest incursion into Hollywood.
The deal would give Tencent the opportunity to cofinance Skydance Media films, which would benefit from the Chinese firm’s distribution and marketing in the world’s second-largest movie market, the firms said in a statement.
It did not provide financial details, but the Los Angeles Times cited an unidentified source familiar with the deal as saying that Tencent had paid more than US$100 million for a stake of 5 to 10 percent.
Founded in 2010, Skydance has produced 15 films, most in collaboration with Paramount Pictures, including the Star Trek franchise. It is preparing to release sequels to the Mission: Impossible, Terminator and Top Gun sagas in the next two years.
Tencent has become one of the world’s most valuable companies, raking in profits from its addictive mobile game Honor of Kings and WeChat (微信), China’s most popular all-purpose social media app that has nearly 1 billion users. It last year joined the exclusive club of companies with a market capitalization of more than US$500 billion.
Tencent has already made inroads into the movie business, investing in last year’s Hollywood blockbuster Kong: Skull Island, while it also has control of one of China’s major movie ticketing services.
Its partnership with Skydance “also supports collaboration on other media initiatives, including television, interactive and virtual reality,” the statement said.
The move comes after major conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group Co (萬達集團), whose interests range from real estate to entertainment, snatched up Legendary Entertainment LLC — maker of Jurassic World and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy — for US$3.5 billion, as well as US-based cinema chain AMC Theatres.
However, it also follows warnings from Beijing against the “irrational investments” overseas by Chinese companies, particularly in the movie industry.
A financing deal between Huahua Media (華樺傳媒) and Paramount Hollywood studios valued at US$1 billion in November last year fell through as a result of the regulatory tightening.
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
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
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],”
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