Li Ruigang: Investment logic focuses on top content, online media and offline fields

Faced with the increasingly divided cultural and entertainment needs of China society, Li Ruigang admitted that Chinese culture should be laid out early in response to the consumption needs of different communities.

Original title Li Ruigang: High-quality content always shines with the brilliance of idealism

. Li Ruigang, chairman of Chinese Culture, appears in almost every corner of China's entertainment industry.

Some people say that Li Ruigang is a godfather in the entertainment investment industry. His investment landscape includes China's most influential entertainment product matrix at present: in the film and television field, he has invested in Hong Kong's veteran TV station TVB, and joined hands with Hollywood companies to build the Oriental DreamWorks and flagship film industry. He has also invested in film technology company IMAX China and special effects company BaseFX; in the field of news and information, he has participated in investing in Caixin Media, Pear Video, Wall Street News, Curiosity Daily and sports vertical media Lazy Bear Sports; In the field of Internet entertainment, Li Ruigang's investment has become more diversified. Station B, which gathers a large number of second-yuan cultural enthusiasts, women's idol team SNH48, which is deeply involved in performing in small theaters, and fast hands on the Short Video sharing platform, have all been pulled into his investment landscape.

His entertainment investments cover almost all aspects of the needs of China people from entertainment and leisure, news and information to life aesthetics. At Davos in the winter of 2017, the hot investor set his sights on the global market and called on China capital to leverage global resources through integration.

During this summit business forum, the reporter chatted with Li Ruigang around the stove all night and chatted about the logic behind his complex investments. Li Ruigang, who was born as a media person, also shared his understanding of the changes in the global media landscape and his views on media investment. Faced with the increasingly divided cultural and entertainment needs of China society, Li Ruigang admitted that Chinese culture should be laid out early in response to the consumption needs of different communities.

"Li-style" investment logic

"In my investment logic, I value three areas: head content, online media and offline areas." Li Ruigang is happy to share his investment ideas with reporters. If you take a look at his current investment landscape, you will find that these layouts are extended step by step along careful logical thinking. In the online and offline field alone, Li Ruigang has made repeated moves in the past two years, including joining hands with the British Merlin Group to enter theme parks and investing in a team with rich performance experience in the small theater field represented by the idol team SNH48.

The header content is the words mentioned frequently in Li Ruigang's mouth. The so-called head content refers to those high-quality popular content products that have good reputation and influence, and are often able to obtain the audience with the "greatest common denominator". As early as July 2015, Chinese culture acquired a stake in Hou Hongliang's Noon Sunshine, the currently highly sought after content team, who successively created phenomenon-level works such as "Nirvana in Fire","The Pretender", and "Ode to Joy". In terms of sports head copyright, Li Ruigang is also not willing to be outdone. His Sports Olympic Power won the broadcast rights of the Super League for 5 years and 8 billion yuan, pushing the competition for top-level event IP to a new stage.

Li Ruigang's interest in online media stems from his observation of changes in global media. Li Ruigang, who was a media worker, had experience studying in the United States, which gave him a personal understanding of the iterative changes in the media industry between China and the United States: "In the past, Americans read The Huffington Post and The New York Times, but now a large number of people have moved to the news aggregation site BuzzFeed."

Li Ruigang knows that the global media industry is undergoing a profound iteration. Users 'attention is shifting from traditional media to Internet media such as news aggregation and content sharing communities. Although traditional radio, television and print media rely on inertia to survive, the era of change has arrived.

"Online media is the hope for the future. They do not have the burden of traditional media. The sharing method, media organization structure, and content distribution are all completely Internet-based." In Li Ruigang's view, traditional media with top brand influence, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, will still exist, but the potential of more traditional media will be transferred to online media,"This will be The focus of future attention."

"Investing in Caixin can bear its losses."

Li Ruigang is an investor in many media teams with distinctive personalities. He maintains interaction with the pear video team newly formed by Qiu Bing, former founder of The Paper, Wu Xiaopeng's Wall Street News team, and Hu Shuli's team. These teams include both emerging online media that grew up on the Internet and traditional established media.

Pear videos and Wall Street experiences are embodiments of Li Ruigang's investment direction. Li Ruigang positioned Pear Video as a Short Video information platform that caters to the needs of fragmented life in the Internet era. The predecessor of Wall Street News was the personal blog of Wu Xiaopeng, a reporter from 21st Century Business Herald. This blog grew up in the Internet 1.0 era and gradually evolved into a financial information integration and provision platform in the Internet 2.0 era.

In his exchanges with reporters, Li Ruigang would always put himself into the perspective of an ordinary user to analyze news products. Taking Pear Video as an example, he emphasized the user's sensitivity to video products."Video consumes users 'time and attention. If a user spends three minutes watching the video and feels terrible, he will lose interest in you." Li Ruigang will privately discuss his feelings with Qiu Bing. He hopes that the content expression of the pear video will be screened and edited to make the information richer and the rhythm clearer."The real content still needs to have editorial ideas and values."

Unlike media with obvious Internet characteristics such as Pear Video and Wall Street News, Caixin Media seems to be an "alien" in Li Ruigang's media investment landscape. This media, which insists on original financial reporting, has completely different attributes from platform-based Internet media.

Li Ruigang's investment in Caixin Media dates back to December 2013. The Chinese Cultural Industry Investment Fund signed an equity transfer agreement with Zhejiang Newspaper Media. Chinese Culture accounted for more than 40% of the shares, becoming the largest shareholder of Caixin Media. In fact, Li Ruigang has rich experience in managing financial media. As early as when he was in charge of Shanghai Cultural and Broadcasting Group, he promoted the all-media transformation of his First Financial Media.

In Li Ruigang's view, the strategic significance of investing in Caixin is greater than the financial significance, because "it is unrealistic to put forward particularly high demands on print media today. I have taken more attention to this influence. In the past few years, I hope to be able to invest in different vertical industries. In the field of financial reporting and commentary, Caixin is still very influential in China." From this perspective, Li Ruigang admitted that he could withstand Caixin's "less prominent financial and even losses."

From secondary yuan to investment in life aesthetics The

aesthetic needs and entertainment needs of China society are undergoing a fission from popularization to diversification. Popular labels such as small town youth, secondary yuan people, and middle class all represent these specific communities. Li Ruigang saw all these in his eyes, and Chinese culture also began to lay out these diversified entertainment demand markets early on.

Because the article "Cruel Story at the Bottom: A Video Software's Rural China" triggered a huge discussion on Social networks, it was a Short Video sharing application company, and the Chinese Culture Series B investment entered this startup company. Fast Hand has quickly accumulated 400 million users in the past three years and has a wide user base in third-and fourth-tier cities. Although the culture of the fast-hand platform has encountered negative doubts such as eye-catching, boring and vulgar in public opinion circles, Li Ruigang prefers to view the platform with a neutral perspective. In his eyes, the fast-hand is that "various groups of people use all kinds of martial arts to showcase all kinds of creative fun and creative sparks." Li Ruigang is even more optimistic about fast-hand users who have high stickiness and wide coverage.

Station B of the barrage website is Li Ruigang's investment in young people. This post-60s investor broke through the "secondary wall" to observe such groups-they are far away from TV and immersed in their own world, but they are growing up., the future will be mainstream. Li Ruigang also shared with great interest his "secondary geography" with "Caiyue You": the secondary population is mainly on the southeast coast, and the farther north they go, the weaker the west is.

In Li Ruigang's investment logic, the middle class is another huge consumer group.

Research firm Credit Suisse's 2016 Global Wealth Report shows that by 2021, the global middle class (that is, people with net assets of US$10,000 to US$100,000) is expected to add 200 million people, half of whom will come from China.

China's rising middle class has become a huge target consumer market. The Chinese Cultural Industry Investment Fund has begun to deploy this field early, from betting on luxury e-commerce temples with US$100 million to working with Merlin Entertainment in the UK to create theme parks, everything meets the consumer entertainment needs of the middle class.

In addition to investment in the field of material consumption, the field of spiritual consumption is also a sector that Li Ruigang values. Due to the rapid growth of wealth in China society, there is a certain mismatch between the middle class's wealth status and the aesthetics of life. Li Ruigang invested in "One Article" focuses on the needs arising from this mismatch.

On September 8, 2014, Xu Husheng, then editor-in-chief of "The Bund Pictorial", released the first video product on the Weixin Official Accounts "One", presenting videos related to lifestyle from the perspective of the middle class. In mid-2016,"Yitiao" announced that it had 20 million users, 1 million daily activities, and a valuation of US$200 million.

Li Ruigang was Xu Husheng's earliest angel investor. He is very satisfied with the current financial situation of "Yitiao": a thin public account, with an e-commerce revenue of 30 to 40 million yuan per month.

He even predicted that "One", which carries life aesthetics education, may be available in the near future.

Editor: Nancy