Is CJ ENM a Pioneer or a Predator?

CJ ENM has been behind hits like films from "Extreme Job", dramas "Mr. Sunshine" and TV shows "Three Meals A Day", "Produce 101", and "Show Me The Money". This year, the company has joined hands with BTS's agency Big Hit Entertainment to expand its revenue to the music section.

Advertisement

CJ E&M merged with CJ O Shopping in July last year to create CJ ENM. At that time, the slogan was 'global convergence and composite contents and commerce company' and 'Korea's No. 1 global entertainment group'.

Sales rose 9.7% last year to 4.3576 trillion won and operating profit gained 9.5% to 315 billion won. This is the result of its business tie-up capabilities in contents, commerce, and media solutions since the merger. Although the movie sector was the only one in the red, it is expected that the movie industry will see a comeback this year with "Extreme Job" that ranked second in the box office of 16 million people.

Overseas markets are also speeding up production of local films by expanding into the existing Southeast Asian markets such as Vietnam, as well as the North American market, which is the mainland of film.

The company is good at growing up through partnership and merger. A total of 10 entertainment agencies are owned by subsidiaries. They include Jellyfish Entertainment, which includes the groups VIXX and Gugudan, Eric Nam's management agency Stone Music Entertainment, Wanna One's agency Swing Entertainment, Kang Daniel's agency MMO Entertainment, and Korean underground hip-hop management agencies Amoeba Culture, AOMG, Highlight Records and Higher Music Records. CJ ENM is also one of the second largest shareholders of Genie Music (15.35%) and also includes Studio Dragon, Hwa and Dam Pictures, Culture Storehouse, KPJ, JK Film, and JS Pictures as subsidiaries and corporations.

This month, CJ ENM held hands with Big Hit Entertainment and established a new management agency called Belief Lab.

A source from CJ ENM says, "With the aim of creating the next BTS, we plan on holding domestic auditions first. After global preliminaries in USA and Japan are over, we plan on producing and sending out audition programs in the future".

Specialists say CJ ENM will propagate this year too with series contents, digital advertising and more.

Series or seasonal productions of TV shows have been established in all production sectors, making it easier to make profits.

With DIA TV, which is a part of South Korea's No. 1 multi-channel network (MCN) group, it is also drawing attention from the digital advertising market. DIA TV has 230 million subscribers, 1,400 creators and 2 billion monthly views of content.

"CJ ENM has a competitive edge in TV, digital sectors and a variety of advertising platforms such as broadcasting, digital, and outsources so that it can provide an integrated solution for advertising from media planning to analysis of advertising effects", said Lee Ki-hoon, a researcher at Hana Financial Investments.