Mumbai: The focus areas of the company in the APAC market have not changed much in the last one year, said Luke Kang, who was appointed as The Walt Disney Company, president – APAC, excluding India in 2020. Under his leadership, the APAC business has undergone restructuring with the appointment of a D2C head, spun off a division in Indonesia to grow the market and maximise the regional scale and in-market expertise in markets like Japan and China.
Kang virtually addressed the APOS summit on media, telecoms, and entertainment industry in APAC organised by Media Partners Asia on Tuesday.
The APAC market is critical to grow Disney+ 116 million SVOD subscribers globally, said Kang. The streaming platform has had a soft launch in Japan and will soon launch in South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. “The APAC market will contribute a sizeable share to the global subscriber base” he added.
Even though most of their content is produced in the US, the audiences in the APAC market including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore have embraced Disney+, noted Kang. “These markets have a strong affinity for global and regional content”, he said.
“We’re not going to dabble in local content, but be a major player”, he emphasised when talking about the importance of producing content in local markets and supporting the creative economy in these markets. Kang said that first it would be important to understand the nuances about the customers in these markets. For example, he observed that consumers in Indonesia prefer to consume Korean or Japanese content. Those kinds of insights would enable Disney+ to make relevant investments to grow their subscriber share in local markets.
“We are thinking differently, than we used to pre-D2C. We get a lot more data in real-time. We are learning that we need to be very broad,” said Kang, “We will be doing a lot of local and regional content across multiple markets, to make our service better, more exciting, more localised.”
Speaking about the importance of SVOD business, he said, “SVOD is what you would call the ultimate scalable business. It is the one business in our portfolio where scale really matters. This technology allows us to bring the benefits of our global scale to consumers, especially, to consumers in APAC. Earlier, in the media industry, the content scale was global but it was difficult to scale distribution globally because you had a lot of walled garden ecosystems.”
Earlier this year, Disney has decided to shut 18 TV channels in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong effective from 1 October. The reports indicated that the channels were closed as part of the media company’s focus on increasing its focus on the D2C business.
Speaking about the move, Kang stated, “There’s a role for all media in the lives of consumers, although it changes over time. We’ve had to make tough decisions across the region when it comes to television. We’re making these decisions based on consumer demand, based on where the consumers are going. Consumers are telling us they want to engage with us on digital.”
