Case Study

This Thursday, October the 20th, Juliette Vivier, international director of the Hiventy group, accompanied by Patrice Carré, journalist at Film Français, focused on the technical industries and the evolution of their businesses. In particular, they discussed the new commercial territories in the major developing regions (Asia and Africa).

After a quick portrait of Hiventy, a historical company that intervenes in the whole chain of post-production services, Juliette Vivier first proposed an X-ray of the African audiovisual market, then of the Asian audiovisual market.

In Africa, a continent of 1.1 billion people with the fastest growing population in the world, the average age is 20-22 years for a middle class that has tripled in 30 years. Because of this average age, the modes of audiovisual consumption have changed, moving from television to streaming on mobile or smart TV.

As far as language is concerned, the African continent is quite homogeneous with a dominance of French, English and Arabic followed by vernacular languages such as Swahili, Wolof or Pidgin to name a few. Due to the high rate of local illiteracy (about 40% of the population), dubbing is particularly popular.

Moreover, as the continent is very poorly served in terms of film distribution, the mobile is becoming the main issue in terms of capturing new consumers. However, Pay-TV remains dominant with 22.6 million subscribers. Canal+ remains the leader, but new OTT entrants such as Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney+ are rapidly establishing themselves and multiplying acquisitions and original local productions to secure their place.

Finally, cinema, and theaters in particular, have not yet said their last word. While multiplexes are in full development on the continent, this is benefiting heritage cinema, which is becoming increasingly popular locally. While South Africa is restoring its films, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is seeking funds to do so, Kenya is digitizing the archives of the Kenyatta family, a powerful local family. The country will then move to the defense archives. A particularity exists: Nigeria. With 200 million inhabitants and 2,500 films and series produced per year, the country is the world's leading producer in terms of volume. So much so that locally, the audiovisual sector represents 2% of GDP, just behind oil.

In Asia, there is less homogeneity, notably due to the disparity of languages, and the market is more mature and competitive. Here too Pay-TV dominates, with 2/3 of households having access to it, particularly in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and China. Even India is seeing its cinemas deserted in favor of OTT and IPTV. Outside of China, YouTube remains the leader with 42% share, followed by Netflix, 33%, Amazon, 12% and Disney, 11%. Asia accounts for a total of 45% of Disney+ subscribers in the world while TikTok continues to gain traction in the region. The film industry in this region is experiencing a post-covid revival driven by China, particularly on local and European content, while in South East Asia there is a renewed interest in the important wave of independent cinema of the 90s, but these films require significant restoration work.

For the technical industries, the challenges are diverse according to Hiventy in these territories:

-    The post-production desert in Sub-Saharan Africa offers many investment challenges

-    The localization of subtitling and dubbing work

-    Setting up encoding, packaging and delivery operations

-    Addressing content storage issues

-    Bringing in European know-how in terms of heritage preservation and restoration.

For its part, Hiventy, in addition to its historical photochemicals lab in Jointville, has opened sites in Vietnam, Singapore, Kenya, Nigeria and Morocco to develop their market and contribute to local developments.