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by Robert Cain for China Film Biz

June 2, 2013

Over coffee in Hong Kong last week I received some sage advice from my friend Cole Sirucek, a former investment manager for Singapore’s Temasek fund and now a successful entrepreneur. “Mind the difference between value creation and value capture when you do business in China,” he advised.

It’s a distinction that many in Hollywood tend to overlook. It’s fairly easy to create value in China with American entertainment content and ideas. But capturing that value and repatriating it to one’s own bank account remains a difficult challenge.

When the New York Times’ Hilary Howland asked me to write an opinion piece on U.S.-China entertainment trade, I thought value capture would be an interesting topic to explore. The Times published my op-ed essay today, and I’ve provided below a slightly longer version of the same piece.

Capturing the Value of American Movies in China

Transnational trade and investment between America’s and China’s entertainment industries revolve around four fundamental sources of value.

1. Access to American content, particularly (but certainly not limited to) globally commercial “tent-pole” films, popular television programs, and reality show formats.
2. Access to American creative and managerial talent, with their proven abilities to generate content and profitably exploit it.
3. Access to China’s very large, rapidly growing market, soon to be the world’s biggest source of entertainment revenue.
4. Access to production capital, with America’s investment capacity in relative decline and China’s on the rise.

American legislators, investors and entertainment industry managers must recognize the difference between value creation and value capture. America’s entertainment sector is by far the world’s greatest creator of value for distributors and audiences around the world, and it has traditionally succeeded in capturing much of that value wherever it has operated. Roughly fifty percent of all global filmed entertainment revenue currently goes to American companies.

But whereas Americans have been extremely successful in creating value in China, capturing that value has proven a much tougher challenge. With its protectionist policies, its lack of business transparency, and its indifference to intellectual property rights, China returns to American content owners not more than twenty percent, and probably less than five percent of all the value U.S. content generates there.

This value loss has serious long-term implications for U.S.-based entertainment companies. Until recently Chinese exhibitors and distributors needed American content to build up their domestic industry. American movies brought in the ticket revenues that built China’s movie theaters, and ad dollars from American TV shows helped develop China’s digital distribution infrastructure. But the Americans have missed the opportunity to leverage the value they’ve created, ceding profits and market power to Chinese suppliers who have not only amassed huge amounts of investment capital, but who have also gotten better at creating their own successful content, dramatically reducing their need for American programming.

Unfortunately for the Americans, they need China now more than ever. As our domestic market matures we must increasingly look overseas for growth. And no market offers better growth potential than China: in the next four or five years China will surpass the U.S. in absolute revenue, and by the middle of the next decade it will dwarf the American market.

U.S. government regulators should bear in mind the principle of value capture as they evaluate cross-border transactions. China prohibits U.S. investors from owning entertainment distribution companies in the PRC, effectively neutering their ability to capture value there. U.S. rules present few such prohibitions to Chinese investors, so it is entirely conceivable—and even probable—that more and more of the U.S. entertainment production and distribution infrastructure will come under the control of Chinese owners.

China treats entertainment as a strategically critical industry, and the U.S. should too, by insisting upon more fair and balanced value capture policies.

Robert Cain is a producer and entertainment industry consultant who has been doing business in China since 1987. He can be reached at rob@pacificbridgepics.com and at www.pacificbridgepics.com.