Games and figurine firms report good sales as Hong Kong's Ani-com show closes
Annual Ani-Com and Games show closes with mixed results reported
The annual animation fair, Ani-Com and Games Hong Kong, has come to an end with companies offering games and figurines reporting good business, while comic companies said their sales continued to dip.
Nicole Lam, an office worker in her 40s, said she had been coming to the fair at the Convention and Exhibition Centre for the past 10 years. She said the booths offering figurines were now bigger with more decorations.
Lam ended up spending thousands on figurines, including some of Iron Man, which she has been collecting for years.
One of the companies that attracted Lam's attention was Hot Toys, the firm that has become known worldwide for its high-end figurines. Hot Toys more than doubled its space compared with last year - from 126 square metres to 297.
An added attraction put on this year by Hot Toys was a one-ton model of the Millennium Falcon spaceship from .
It definitely helped draw more visitors, said the firm's senior marketing executive, Janice Chow.
Chow said that after Ani-com, the model would be taken apart, packed in 16 boxes and flown to conventions in Taiwan, Guangzhou and Southeast Asia.
Gaming companies have also carved out more space for themselves at the Convention Centre.
Close to the entrance are prominent booths for Microsoft, Xbox and Sony's PlayStation.
Jacqueline Chiu Sin-ying, assistant general manager of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong, said she didn't have exact sales figures for this year's Ani-com, but they definitely topped HK$10 million.
"It's much better than expected. Some customers have told us that they're disappointed that they couldn't get what they wanted."
She said they had sold all their white PlayStation 4 game consoles in the first few days, so people who came later had to order a console for picking up at one of their stores.
The big queues around the PlayStation booth weren't just for games. It was also a first chance for gamers to try out the firm's forthcoming virtual reality unit called Project Morpheus. Chiu said there were only 1,000 slots spread out over the fair's five days, and people sometimes had to obtain a ticket and wait for more than three hours for their chance to try the device.
However, local comic book publishers were no longer drawing the crowds they used to. Kimber Hui Pui-wai, a marketing manager at Rightman Publishing, said comic sales had continued to fall, a trend that started three to four years ago.
"People can just read them for free online or download them illegally. That's been the case for the past three or four years. Nothing has been done, so we've just been losing sales," Hui said. "If you ask anyone if they read comics, they'll say yes, but they read them on a phone."
