With many IP resources, the fruit and wheat culture cannot be only Han Han.
On August 18, Guomai Culture completed the online roadshow and will soon realize the IPO. Today, Guomai Culture will launch online and offline subscription, the number of shares issued this time is 18.01 million shares, and the issue price is 8.11 yuan / share.
In November last year, Guomai Culture's initial application was approved by the GEM Listing Committee, which once again reminded people of the bold words of "Li Xunhuan" in that year.
After leaving the banyan tree to announce the closure of the pen, someone in the industry once said bluntly: "Losing the popularity accumulated by Li Xunhuan for many years, you Lu Jinbo is nothing." Since then, with the signing of big-name writers such as Han Han, Annie Baby, Guo Ni, Wang Shuo, Rao Xueman, etc., Lu Jinbo has confirmed that he is not only one of the "three carriages of online literature", but also a business genius. He once boasted: "At the end of 2009, we will be the boss of the domestic literary publishing industry."
01
The publishing world of "Li Xunhuan"
Around 2000, the banyan tree, the originator of online literature, was in its heyday.
From its establishment in 1997 to the next two years, Banyan Tree rapidly expanded to a 200-person cultural company, and writers such as Chen Wanning (Ning Caishen), Lu Jinbo (Li Xunhuan), and Li Jie (Annie Baby) were recruited by William Zhu, the founder of Banyan Tree, to operate the website. He was very generous to his employees, and Chen Wanning and Lu Jinbo had a monthly salary of 20,000 in 2000.
However, the serious imbalance between website expenses and income has laid a great hidden danger for this non-profit-oriented literary space. In 2001, William Zhu announced that the monthly revenue under the banyan tree was 4 million yuan, but he admitted many years later that at that time, there were only tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of income per month.
William Zhu realized that the income from the physical book publishing with the publishing house was only a drop in the bucket, and began to try to cooperate with the radio station, the brand, and let Anne Baby set up a studio to produce paid electronic publications. After trying various commercial means, the payment system at that time could not keep up, and the banyan tree still fell.
In September 2002, Banyan Tree was acquired by Bertelsmann, the world's largest publishing group, and later changed hands, through Happy Media and Shanda Literature. The fate under the banyan tree has been determined, but the writers recruited by William Zhu at that time have different fates, and Ning Caishen became popular because of the "Tale of Wulin Wai" and was imprisoned for personal problems.
Around 2000, because of the popularity of writing articles, Lu Jinbo, whose pen name was Li Xunhuan, was even more smooth after leaving under the banyan tree. In 2002, after Li Xunhuan published "Ink and Ink Thanks" and said goodbye to literature, he re-used his real name Lu Jinbo to act in the public eye, and Wenqing, one of the "troika of online literature", completely turned into an entrepreneur.
In 2008, he cooperated with Wanjuan Publishing Company, a subsidiary of Publishing and Media, to establish Wanrong Book Industry Development Co., Ltd. A year later, Wanrong achieved 200 million yuan (the total pricing of all books) and sold 10 million books a year.
In 2009, Lu Jinbo led the company's team to a meeting in Beijing, and he announced in a calm and gentle tone that they accounted for one-third of the Best Sellers of Chinese Literature in 2008, and declared that they would be the boss of the domestic literary publishing industry in 2009.
In 2012, Lu Jinbo officially founded Guomai Culture, the initial main business is still book publishing, but in 2014, Guomai Culture began to get involved in film investment, and has jointly produced works such as "Everything Grows", "After Forever", "Never Expected", "Riding the Wind and Waves" and so on.
The publishing industry is inseparable from the author. Over the years, Lu Jinbo has also unearthed many core authors. Han Han was one of them.
Han Han's films "After The End" and "Riding the Wind and Waves" are all involved in the fruit and wheat culture. Long before the establishment of the fruit and wheat culture, Lu Jinbo and Han Han had a lot of friendship.
The relationship between Lu Jinbo and Han Han Needless to say, the Guomai Culture Prospectus shows that Lu Jinbo is the largest shareholder, directly holding 32.62% of the shares, and Han Han's mother Zhou Qiaorong ranks the eighth largest shareholder with a personal shareholding ratio of 4.53%.
When Lu Jinbo vigorously developed the fruit and wheat culture, Guo Jingming had already begun to think about industrialized management, at that time, Lu Jinbo had considered taking the youth novel market, and also released some novel writers, but from the effect point of view, there was no Guo Jingming's "pain literature" background.
In contrast, Shen Haobo of Motie Culture is good at grassroots authors, and the Yangtze River Group takes a large-perspective narrative, but Guomai Culture has not found a particularly accurate positioning.
According to the data of open volume information, in 2020, the retail quota of the mass copyright book market of state-owned publishing houses and private book planning companies (the price of books multiplied by the amount obtained by the number) was 70.28% and 29.72% respectively, which shows that China's mass copyright book retail market is basically the world of state-owned publishing houses.
However, there is still room for the world of private publishing, and enterprises can also achieve a great leap forward through the capital market.
02
Big names gathered with Han Han and Yi Zhongtian A shares to ring the bell
From 2018 to 2020, the operating income achieved by Guomai Culture was 305 million yuan, 384 million yuan and 355 million yuan respectively, and in 2020, due to the reduction of offline code ocean, the revenue declined slightly.
According to the prospectus, Guomai Culture has three major businesses, namely book planning and distribution business, digital content business and IP derivative and operation business. Among them, the income of book planning and distribution business was 277 million yuan, 357 million yuan and 336 million yuan respectively, accounting for 94.58%, 96.44% and 96.48% of the main business income, respectively, constituting the main source of income from the main business.
In recent years, Gomak Classics has launched a series of best-selling books such as "The Little Prince", "Six Notes of Floating Life", "The Weakness of Human Nature", "The Book of Poetry", "The Old Man and the Sea", "The Moon and sixpence", "Chao Hua Xi Shi", "Human Disqualification", "The Myth of Cthulhu", "The Great Gatsby", "I Am a Cat", "Walden", "Chrysanthemum and the Knife", "The Rabble", "O Henry's Selected Short Stories", "Inferiority and Transcendence", "Dream of the Red Chamber", "Red and Black", "The Virtues of Human Nature" and so on. By the end of 2020, book products such as "The Little Prince", "Six Notes of Floating Life", and "The Weakness of Human Nature" have sold more than one million copies.
Digital content business and IP derivative and operation business account for a small proportion of the main business income, accounting for about 5% of the total main business income, and the income from IP derivative and operation has been reduced to more than 1 million.
Lu Jinbo is expected to achieve a "leap" in wealth at the same time as the well-known writer and director Han Han, writers Yi Zhongtian, Feng Tang and so on.
In fact, publishing companies such as Guomai Culture have a strong dependence on IP, and in order to establish stable and long-term cooperation and avoid the loss of big IP, Lu Jinbo has bound well-known writers through equity.
In the list of partners of Guomai, there are many well-known writers or their relatives such as Han Han, Yi Zhongtian, Zhang Haochen, Li Jihong, Feng Tang's wife Huangshan, etc., holding 4.53%, 0.19%, 0.20%, 0.28% and 0.19% respectively.
It is worth mentioning that Guomai Culture also participated in the investment in two films directed by Han Han: "Riding the Wind and Waves" and "Flying Life", the cumulative investment amount of the two films was 17.2 million yuan and 28 million yuan respectively, and from 2017 to 2019, the company's film investment income was 886,700 yuan, 13.9472 million yuan and 8.1787 million yuan, accounting for 2.59%, 22.89% and 11.95% of the total profits in the same period, respectively.
03
9 years and 4 rounds of financing, Matrix Partners China, IDG appeared
In the list of shareholders of Guomai Culture, not only are there big names, but there are also many first-line investment institutions.
Since its establishment, Guomai Culture has carried out a total of 4 rounds of financing, and investors include Matrix Partners China, IDG Capital, Bona Film and Television, Zhejiang Media, Huagai Capital, Shengshi Huayun, Xiaocun Capital, Puhua Capital, etc. Among them, Jingwei China, Xiaocun Capital and Huagai Capital have all placed bets twice.
It is worth noting that before landing on the GEM, Guomai Culture signed several VAM agreements and failed. In December 2016, Lu Jinbo signed the "VAM Termination Agreement" with the relevant parties, and Lu Jinbo transferred a total of 1.69% of the equity to Huagai Yingyue and Magnetic Valley Ventures at a low price. Fuhui Growth, Fuhui Xinyue, Huagai Yingyue and Magnetic Valley Venture Capital participated in the capital increase of Guomai Culture at a low price, and adjusted the shares in accordance with the agreement on the VAM.
After the completion of the capital increase, Fuhui Growth, Fuhui Xinyue and Huagaiying signed a VAM agreement with the investor Bona Pictures and other relevant parties in March of the following year. The trigger condition for this bet is that the net profit of Guomai Culture in 2017 is not less than 40 million yuan, otherwise the shareholders of Guomai Culture will transfer part of the equity with Bona Pictures free of charge.
However, in 2018, Guomai Culture completed its performance, and Bona Pictures also issued a "Confirmation Letter".
Affected by the epidemic last year, the fruit and wheat culture experienced a decline, and the income increased significantly in 2021. From January to June, the operating income of Guomai Culture was 204 million yuan, an increase of 39.73% over the same period of the previous year; the comprehensive gross profit margin was 48.78%, an increase of 1.64% over the same period of the previous year; in the same period, the net profit attributable to the shareholders of the parent company was 22.8899 million yuan, a change rate of 69.40% over the same period of the previous year, a significant year-on-year increase.
Just in July this year, Reader Culture successfully IPO. Reader Culture was first issued at the lowest issue price of 1.55 yuan / share since the opening of the ChiNext board, closing up 1942.58%, soaring 19 times on the day of listing, refreshing the record for the highest increase on the first day of the ChiNext board, the closing price was 31.66 yuan / share, the static price-earnings ratio was as high as 245.66 times, and the total market value reached 12.664 billion yuan, staging the new stock myth.
However, the good times were not long, the day after the listing, the reader culture suffered Waterloo, down 25.77% on the same day, the highest decline in the two cities, and was regarded by industry insiders as a "day trip of funds". In the days that followed, reader's stock price continued to fall, all the way down. As of August 18, the market value of Reader Culture was 9 billion, compared with the first day market value of 12.6 billion, it has evaporated 3 billion.
Looking at the publishing business, the business of paper books is difficult to make money, this is the industry consensus, between 2015 and 2019, the book retail market has maintained a growth rate of more than 10%, in 2020, the scale of China's book retail market for the first time showed negative growth, down 5.08% year-on-year, the size of the code ocean was 97.08 billion yuan. Open-volume data show that due to the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the already weak physical bookstores have been closed for semi-closure, the passenger flow has dropped sharply, many bookstores have suffered losses, and the overall sales scale of the yard ocean has dropped by 33.8% year-on-year, and the size of the code ocean is 20.36 billion yuan.
What is more worth mentioning is that the rise of live streaming with goods has made short video book sales a new sales channel, but this kind of sales is mainly based on low prices as a means of promotion, and the discount on the sale of books by some Internet celebrities with goods has even dropped to 35% off - which has approached the hard cost of normal book products.
Industry insiders pointed out that in order to ensure their own profits, publishing houses can only continuously raise their pricing, and the average book price has risen from 15.9 yuan in 2000 to 48 yuan in 2020, which may not be without discount reasons.
The data shows that in the past year, the market lacks eye-catching bestsellers, and the varieties of books that sell more than one million have dropped from 49 in 2019 to 24 in 2020, and the list is still dominated by classic and popular books and best-selling series. Red Rock became the no. 1 fictional category and the top of the overall list. "There's a Commissary in the Clouds" and "The Three-Body Problem" ranked 2nd and 3rd respectively. In other words, most of the entire retail market relies on old books.
If you want to maintain the continuous growth of corporate revenue and net profit, you need to make great efforts in the main publishing business, and in the future, IP-derived TV and movie investment may also be a new way out. With many IP resources, the fruit and wheat culture cannot be only Han Han.