Photo/Wu Fan

Dec. 13 (NBD) – Bilibili, China's video sharing platform for young generations, inked an agreement Wednesday with gaming giant NetEase to acquire the major assets of NetEase Comics including the app, website and a number of copyrights of comics.

The move came after the video website launched the new app Bilibili Comics about one month ago. A batch of well-known Japanese manga, such as One Piece, Gin Tama and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, have been added to the mobile app.

Li Ni, vice chairman and chief operating officer of Bilibili, believes the acquisition will help to enrich online comic offerings of Bilibili and satisfy the growing demands of the company's core users for premium animation, comics and gaming (ACG) contents.

Known as the leading ACG community in China, Bilibili with diversified cultures and active community ecology is popular among Generation Z, said Fan Shaoqing, the general manager of NetEase Literature and Comic. NetEase will create more innovative original comics and animation contents, and jointly spur the incubation, development and promotion of quality intellectual property works.

Released in August 2015, NetEase Comics now has over 20,000 comics, including 1000 overseas works, and more than 600 exclusive contract comics artists home and abroad. The registered users for its app totaled around 40 million. The platform also cooperates with Japanese publisher Shueisha, Koudannsha, Kadokawa and video game developer Square Enix.

The new deal may create a new income source for Nasdaq-listed Bilibili.

When Bilibili's prospectus was disclosed in 2017, its heavy dependence on earnings from game business raised concern in the industry. But the website has been deliberately reducing the proportion of game revenue since it went public in late March this year.

In the financial results for the third quarter of 2018, the company's game revenue accounted for 68.9 percent of the total, a decline of nearly 10 percent from 77 percent for the previous quarter.

Currently Bilibili is speeding up business expansion in ACG sector.

It is noteworthy that China's fast emerging ACG market sees intensified competition recently.

As Bilibili plugs itself into the online comics market, it could meet a lineup of encounters. Leading the race is Kuaikan Manhua, followed by Tencent Comics and other apps, according to an app ranking for 2016 from research firm Analysys.

On October 25, Bilibili reached a strategic partnership with tech giant Tencent to forge collaboration in the upstream and downstream of ACG ecological chain.

Tencent and Bilibili will share animation resources with each other under the permission of the copyright owner and set up a cooperation mechanism for the purchase, investment and production of animations.

The two companies also plan to explore the joint-operation of games.

Last month, Bilibili purchased radio drama app MissEvan, reported media outlet 36Kr. A source revealed that the deal is worth about 1 billion yuan (145.4 million U.S. dollars), which is lower than expected.

Data from Tencent Animation and Comics shows, the user number of the animation and comics market reached 330 million in 2017, close to 370 million for users of Internet literature, and 65 percent of the comics and animation users are young people.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn