After leading the Chinese streaming/VOD industry for years, video streaming service iQiyi
iQIYI, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides online entertainment services under the iQIYI brand name in China. The company has market cap of $14.71 billion. The firm operates a platform that provides a collection of Internet video content, including professionally-produced content licensed from professional content providers and self-produced content.
In a recent report from Reuters, iQiyi CEO Gong Yu claimed that his company is setting a new growth target to grow subscribers based outside China, which takes up as many as half of its total users within the next five years.
To reach this goal, iQiyi, which is a Chinese version of Netflix-style
Gong's statement came after iQiyi saw membership services account for 50% of its total revenue for the first time in the third quarter of 2019. According to a quarterly earnings report released in November, the company's membership services revenue totaled 3.7 billion yuan ($520 million), representing a whopping 30% increase from a year earlier. It attributed the gain to the solid growth in the number of subscribers during the period.
iQiyi, which is invested by search engine giant Baidu
In November, iQiyi said it had 105.8 million subscribers while Tencent Video said it had nearly 100 million paid subscribers at the end of June.
Domestically, the Baidu-backed company is also mulling price hikes of 10% to 20% in the second half of 2020, taking advantage of its position in what is shaping up to be an oligopolistic market, with the other major players being Tencent Video and Youku.
On the other hand, the U.S.-China trade war remains an obstacle for the company, which is traded on the New York-based Nasdaq.
"70% of our investors are from the U.S. so a trade war between the U.S. and China will lower American investors' confidence in Chinese companies, make it harder for us [to receive] investment. [It] makes it hard for us to do fundraising," Gong said.
