Southeast Asia: the privileged gateway for Korean, Chinese and Japanese content

If a viewer tries to find a global weekly top 10 on Netflix which does not feature any South Korean movie, TV series or TV show, it will have to jump 6 months ago. At the time of writing, there has constantly been at least one piece of South Korean content for 27 consecutive weeks. Hallyu, which literally means “Korean wave”, designates the export of South Korean soft power abroad. For many years, its most popular form has been K-pop music. Over time, South Korean video content has nonetheless established legitimacy up to becoming key in global platforms’ strategy. As South Korea lacks both the animation reputation of Japan and the speaking poll size of China, the battle for soft power performance has become a major competition field between the three countries.Why does local content perform so well in these countries? What strategies do they implement to export content abroad, in particular in Southeast Asia? Relevance of Chinese, Korean and Japanese content in their home countries In East Asia, companies in the media and entertainment field have built their strategy around local content. As in any country, it thrives thanks to its anchor in society: common values, cultural and historical knowledge are being shared to viewers in their mother tongue by locally popular actors. This phenomenon is particularly relevant in China, Japan and South Korea, due to their strong national identity, based on a language that is used in no other country. In South Korea, local films have dominated the box-office for decades, attracting more viewers than foreign movies every year in the 2010s. Domestic movies accounted for half of all releases before the COVID pandemic, compared to 55% in Japan and 62% in China. As a comparison, the figure stood at only 40% in France and 37% in the UK. In addition, South Koreans watched on average 4.2 movies per capita in cinemas a year, ranking at the 2nd place worldwide. This made the country the 3rd largest box-office market outside of North America, according to Motion Picture Association. However, public institutions have pushed this initial advantage over foreign productions a step further. While pushing local content production and promotion, they have maintained strong barriers to entry. The first part is quite common and consists in financial support from national institutions to the industry. The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism for example unveiled a highly ambitious plan on November 14th aimed at boosting the video content industry. It includes tax deduction for streaming platforms, a K-content strategy fund to boost the export of South Korean content, as well as the Release Promotional Fund to support voluntary holdback by filmmakers.On top of that, regulators have elaborated regulations...