The Next Niche in China Kids Entertainment

When we look into animations there are 3 main focused categories basically:

 Hero
 Friendship
 Funny

“Hero” style animations are the most popular and successful worldwide, IP such as Gundam, Ultra-Man and Power Rangers are in this category. “Friendship” animations are the hardest animation to be produced’ Doraemon is an example of such animations. And lastly in the “Funny” category we have Smurf, Popeye, Tom and Jerry but writing and producing such scripts is hard.

In China the “Hero” category is heavily hit with many animations IP but none know the secret towards building a lasting brand, image and character till the emergence of the “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf” which showed that a constant broadcasting of a single animation can leads towards a much bigger success than having multiple animations IP projects. “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf” showed it with more than 500 episodes and still in production, it is rumored that the price Disney paid above USD 150 million but announced a signed a licensing deal for 10 years in China for RMB 100 million instead.

Alpha quickly adopted this strategy on to all its key animations IP and do 2nd round of production for ARMOR HERO 2, FRUITY ROBO 2 and BLAZING TEENS 3 live TV action series for 2011. Blazing Teens animations was a huge success in China with more above RMB 600 million in retail sales of their “YoYo” toys.

In the “Funny” category there are Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf, Fruity Robo and Kaixin BaoBei. It is said that in China the talent for producing such animations is rare.

The Age Groups

Basically we are looking at kids of 5 years old to 12 years as the key target audience simply because these are also the key age where toys sales are most apparent. While there is a niche for the teenagers segment of above 12 to 16 there are no serious toys sales here in China as yet. However as China economy grows this market will open up eventually for a higher quality toys such as “collectables”. In the US comics characters and replica items from the animated movies and comics are popular among the teens.

The Missing Niche

Pre-school market in China will be the next key target market for certain. The company that moves into this area first will get the first mover advantage for certain. Babies products is already a key hot item today and in the West pre-school series like “Tele-tubbies” are super popular. Here we are looking at kids between 3 to 5 years old. However in this area you will need to be addressing a different market segment and making the series for an entirely different audience “babies”.