Cultural group banks on new platform for expansion

Chinese cultural and entertainment company Perfect World Investment &Holding Group has rolled out a new internet brand 88 and its first personal business email, betting big on the country's promising internet commerce market sector.

The company said the new 88 internet brand will mainly focus on offering internet products such as email services, a knowledge platform, professional networking, recruitment products and business information products. It will seek to provide individual users with solutions that foster efficient communication and better social connections.

The company said the email service under the new 88 brand mainly targets small and medium-sized enterprise users, freelancers and college students looking to enter the job market.

Chi Yufeng, chairman of Perfect World Investment& Holding Group, said the new brand also caters to the specific needs of professionals. For instance, 8 in Chinese is pronounced similar to fa, meaning well off or getting rich, and thus 88 also contains meanings such as inviting great wealth and luck.

"With the advent of the 5G era, we aim to offer all professionals better work experiences, and we will also use new technologies to create better products in the future," Chi said.

With the rise of millennials in the workforce, young professionals are gradually becoming the nucleus of the business society, creating a huge market for new types of business products and services.

A report released by Chinese online recruitment platform Liepin.com said as more young people enter the job market with growing purchasing power, particularly those born in the 1990s, they tend to spend more money on diversified products and services that meet their specific needs.

Compared with their parents' generation, the young born in the 1990s tend to be trendy types who pay more attention to individualism and fashion in consumption, the report said.

Xiao Hong, vice-chairman of Perfect World Investment & Holding Group, said the new brand and its first email product exactly meet the specific needs of young professionals and aim to help young people achieve positive social goals.

"We've found two pain points that needed to be solved. First, the current email products can hardly meet the young generation's growing demand for fashionable business email products, especially for those born in the 1990s and 1995s. Second, existing email products may not fulfill working professionals' need for teamwork and refined project management," Xiao said.

Xiao believes those unmet needs left room for newcomers in the market and the company's new brand will continue to introduce new products, tools and services to meet the needs of young professionals in the workplace.

Owning a listed arm in Perfect World Co Ltd, Perfect World Investment & Holding Group has introduced its products in over 100 countries and regions around the world. It has established dozens of branches locally and abroad, including in the United States, the Netherlands, France, South Korea and Japan.

At this time, the group is involved in business segments such as movies and television, games, cinemas, animation, literature, media and education.