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| Barun Roy: Showtime in Vietnam | |
| ASIA FILE | | Barun Roy / New Delhi December 18, 2008, 0:05 IST | |
 Along with a boom in retail, a multiplex revolution is set to transform the entertainment horizon.
Come 2009, Vietnam will allow 100 per cent foreign ownership in retail business, and as this spurs vigorous competition in the country’s retail market, investors are keeping plans ready for an expected entertainment boom.
One leads to the other. When Lotte Mart, Ho Chi Minh City’s first western-style superstore being built by South Korea’s Lotte Group, opens in the coming weeks, a Lotte multiplex movie facility will be part of it. Last July, MegaStar, a US-Vietnam joint enterprise, opened its fifth multiplex in Vietnam at the Big C supermarket in Danang. As other larger-sized shopping centres come into being, backed principally by South Koean, Taiwanese, Singaporean, and Malaysian investors, more multiplexes will appear on the scene in response to bounding demand for new-age shopping and entertainment from Vietnam’s predominantly young population.
MegaStar triggered the multiplex revolution in Vietnam two years ago when it launched an eight-screen facility in Hanoi and a nine-screen one in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Since then it has set up multiplexes in Haiphong and Bien Hoa, and is now all set to open another one in HCMC early next year. By 2012, MegaStar hopes to have between 100 and 150 multiplex screens in place in Vietnam.
The way Vietnam’s retail property market is developing, finding new multiplex locations won’t be a problem. The country now has about 400 supermarkets, 60 shopping centres, and close to 8,000 convenience stores. Two years from now, analysts say, there are likely to be 65 per cent more supermarkets and 150 per cent more shopping centres. And these will be large, modern, western-style facilities combining shopping, leisure, and entertainment. Lotte itself, which already operates a large network of convenience stores in Vietnam, has a second HCMC supermarket in mind, while another Korean firm, GS Retail, plans to open 10 shopping centres in Binh Duong Province alone in the next two years.
To developers and investors, Vietnam is a virgin territory for movie entertainment. With only about a hundred operating screens, mostly old and decrepit, in a country of 85 million people, the population, more than half which is under 25 years of age and free of hangovers from the past, is practically starved. There’s no such thing as a viable domestic movie industry. Until about a decade ago, all it produced were mainly newsreels and documentaries, and only a handful of features. That has changed recently, with movies featuring modern topics, even the lives of prostitutes, but the numbers are small. In 2007, for example, only 17 features were produced locally while 107 foreign movies were imported, mostly from the US, South Korea, and China. But there are limits to imports, too, because there simply aren’t enough screens to show them.
It’s this starvation that’s fuelling the current craze among the Vietnamese for online gaming. They’re into games because movie facilities are too limited. According to one research report, the country will have over 10 million online gamers by 2011, against some 3 million now, and most of the games will be sourced from South Korea and China. But as foreign enterprises probe investment opportunities in this area, they believe the gaming craze can be easily transformed into big-time movie retailing.
Lotte, apparently, has big plans for Vietnam, already an expanding market for Korean movies and games. A Korean film festival in Hanoi last May drew huge crowds, and the Vietnamese minister for culture, Hoang Tuan Anh, seized the occasion to announce plans for a $450 million film studio the government wants to build as a joint venture with the Korean Film Council. He set 2012 as the target date to complete the project. So, when Lotte Cinema announced, also in May, its acquisition of the Korean distribution company DMC that owned three cinemas in HCMC and three in Danang, the move wasn’t seen as only a coincidence. In addition to its own proposed multiplexes, Lotte will renovate all six DMC outlets in a big way.
Vietnam’s love affair with Korean movies isn’t too old. Until 1986, it was Hong Kong that ruled the roost, with over 90 per cent of the movies shown in the country coming from there, mainly kung fu and action types. Korean movies were first introduced in 1999 and became popular only since 2004. Movies from China are popular, too, but South Korean romances, comedies, and thrillers dominate 55 per cent of the market. China has about 30 per cent of it while Vietnamese and Hollywood productions account for the rest.
Interestingly, the Korean wave is sweeping into Vietnamese consumer choices as well. Because of the movies, made-in-Korea products are gaining ground — good for Korea’s exports — as is the urge to visit Korea as tourists, which is good for Korea’s tourism. All in all, it’s shaping up as a great package of goodwill that any country would want to have in any country it does business with.
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