Guangdong TV, radio get in tune
Combined effort to recapture market share lost to HK rivals
Guangdong will consolidate five television and radio stations under a new group company in an effort to streamline operations and recapture market share from Hong Kong and foreign broadcasters, according to provincial media sources.
Under the planned revamp, Guangdong Television, Nanfang Television, Guangdong Radio, Guangdong Cable Network and a satellite broadcasting company will be brought under the auspices of the newly created Guangdong Radio, Film and Television Group (GRFT). GRFT will be controlled by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) through its Guangdong provincial arm.
The reorganisation - to be completed within three months - is the most significant attempted to date in Guangdong's broadcasting industry, and mirrors the group structures pioneered years earlier by the province's newspapers that greatly enhanced their competitiveness and profitability.
'Currently, the broadcasters focus on their individual operations and there is direct government participation in each company,' an external relations official with the Guangdong Administration of Radio, Film and Television (GDARFT) said. 'We are now restructuring them into one operating group in order to have more control and better collaboration.
'We have been preparing for this restructuring for more than two years.'
GDARFT director Wang Keman, who was appointed at the beginning of this year, has been instructed by SARFT to complete the reorganisation by January. A request for an interview with Mr Wang was denied on the grounds that he was 'too busy with the reorganisation'.
Unlike other regional broadcasters on the mainland, Guangdong television stations have lost market share to Hong Kong terrestrial broadcasters TVB and ATV, whose signals extend into the Pearl River delta.
The delta is also the only area in China where foreign satellite broadcasters have received permission to beam their signals direct to residents' homes, further eroding local television stations' market share.
Guangdong's television advertising market is estimated to be worth more than four billion yuan (HK$3.74 billion) a year.
Elsewhere on the mainland, licensed foreign channels can be viewed legally only in selected hotels and expatriate residential compounds.
Media officials hope that the new group structure will help Guangdong's broadcasting companies improve management, cut costs and boost revenues. In particular, they want production operations to be more tightly managed as separate budgetary line-items with clear profit-and-loss calculations for each.
Industry sources said that many of the coming changes at GRFT were foreshadowed by recent reforms at Guangzhou Television. On joining Guangzhou Television last year, station director Li Jinyuan inherited a bureaucratic and overstaffed organisation, with many of its 1,200 staff moonlighting.
Mr Li closed a third of the station's production centres and tightened spending, using foreign broadcasters' cost structures as benchmarks. The continuing reforms at the station could cost half of Guangzhou Television's employees their jobs.
