“Vietnam’s cinema industry is blossoming”

As living standard has been vastly improved, Vietnamese people are now willing to pay more for entertainment activities that were once considered luxurious. Among those, going to the cinemas emerges as a very popular opion to spend some free time on.

Taking advantage of this trend, cinema industry in Vietnam has made huge progress and are still on course of further development. In 2015, 39.6 million tickets worth 104 million USD were sold. It is expected that the figure will reach 200 million USD in 2020.

Having such a great potential, it is no surprise that Vietnam’s cinema industry has attracted great attention from foreign investors, especially from Korea. Currently, CJ CGV (operating in Vietnam since 2005) and Lotte Cinema (operating in Vietnam since 2008) are the distinct market leaders, together accounting for 77% of the number of cinemas in Vietnam by the end of 2017.

Table 1: Major cinemas in Vietnam (data by Dec 2017)

Vietnamese players such as Galaxy Cinema (Galaxy Studio JSC.) and BHD (BHD Media JSC.) are also setting eyes on business expansion, with BHD aiming to have around 20 cinemas by 2020 . Besides the major cinemas, Beta Cineplex (Vietnamese Beta Media JSC) is a notable newcomer, receiving an investment package worth 27.5 million USD from Blue HK Investments of Hongkong in July 2017.

Regarding what is shown on the screens, foreign movies have been dominating the market, particularly those from American. In 2017, there were only 35 Vietnamese movies compared to 91 American ones.

Even though quite limited in quantity, Japanese movies still has its own unique position in the market thanks to considerable popularity of Manga – Anime within Vietnamese youth. Animated adaptations of “One Piece”, “Naruto”, “Doraemon”, etc. are heartily welcome by their Vietnamese fan base as well as the public. “Your name” (2016) achieved outstanding result when attracting around 37,000 audiences in only 3 days from its release.

Graph 1: Number of films shown in Vietnam cinemas in 2017, categorized by countries of origin (total n=188)

Source: JETRO

About revenue, both Vietnamese and foreign movies have reached new heights in recent years, and CGV have showed up quite frequently as official distributor of such financially successful products.

Table 2: Movies of biggest revenue in Vietnam in 2017