Vista Group Completes Joint Venture With China Online Ticketing Firm WePiao

Deal will provide platform to expand analytics business in China

Murray Holdaway Vista Group
Murray Holdaway

Film software firm Vista Group has announced a joint venture with China’s WeYing Technology Co., better known as WePiao, one of the biggest online movie ticket sellers in the world’s second-largest — and fastest-growing — movie market.

Vista, a New Zealand-based company that sells cinema management, film distribution and customer analytics software, will provide the new venture with rights to its suite of products. They include flagship Vista Cinema theater management software, Movio, which does data analytics, and Veezi, a cloud-based software-as-a-service entity designed for the independent market. Vista called Veezi “ideally suited to the large number of smaller cinemas in China” in a statement announcing the deal.

The venture will also provide a platform for Vista’s software in China. WePiao is an affiliate of Chinese tech and media giant Tencent, and its software is integrated into Tencent’s WeChat, which has more than 600 million monthly active users, mostly in China.

When the deal is complete, Vista Group will hold 40 percent of the new company. WePiao will also subscribe for up to 2 percent of new shares issued in Vista Group.

“Vista has been committed to the China market for some time and this combination will enable us to support and grow our existing cinema customer base, provide a wider range of services to the China market and ensure we can become a significant supplier to the fastest growing film market in the world,” Vista Group CEO Murray Holdaway said in the statement. “The new venture with WePiao and its corporate owners WeChat and Tencent, through their market position, is expected to enable us to achieve growth that Vista by itself could not.”

“It is very good to partner with the world’s leading supplier of software in the film industry,” WePiao CEO Lin Ning added in the statement. “We are looking forward to bringing our Chinese market capability and influence to the business in China, to accelerate the growth in the fast growing film and cinema sector of the Chinese economy. We also look forward to potential cooperation with Vista Group in other markets in the future.”

Online ticketing is huge in China, with 79 percent of all tickets sold online and 88 percent of those via mobile apps such as WePiao. That compares with about 30 percent of U.S. movie tickets sold online. One reason it has become so popular: heavy subsidies from companies like Tencent that own the ticketing apps.

At TheWrap’s TheGrill media and entertainment leadership conference earlier this week, WeYing Vice President Luke Xiang told TheWrap that the subsidies were intended to “form a habit” of going to the movies, rather than waiting for a film to hit the Internet. And he said that while a night at the movies in China is much cheaper than one in the U.S. — the average ticket price in China is around $5 — it’s still pricey compared with neighboring countries and other entertainment options.

“[We want] to invite young people to come to the cinema instead of spending time or money on other forms of entertainment,” he said.

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