Shanghai firms speed up globalization with new brands, digital services
Editor's notes:
High-quality growth, the most-mentioned phrase during the Two Sessions, will keep guiding China's new route of development. As a bellwether city, Shanghai takes a model role in mapping out a growth of high quality, and here are what we find in different sectors of our life.
Shanghai-based Giant Network officially unveiled a new overseas brand ZTimes at the 2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC), a global gaming exhibition held in San Francisco earlier this month.
Shanghai's tech firms are actively establishing footholds globally in the culture, entertainment and finance sectors, with new brands and branches and further booming overseas revenue.
The expansion will enhance China's cultural confidence and overseas influence. It also fits well with Shanghai's long-term development blueprint to become a global eSports capital and a global finance center.
Shanghai-based Giant Network officially unveiled a new overseas brand ZTimes at the 2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, a global gaming exhibition held in March annually.
ZTimes is an abbreviation of Giant's milestone game Zhengtu or ZT. Giant will increase its brand value globally, build more channels and strategic investments and create a new generation of games using Web3 technology.
"We hope to establish a complete gaming ecosystem where we give back game asset ownership to players, and where in-game items can be freely traded," Giant said in a statement.
Science fiction (Sci-Fi) literature works have also received a warm response globally, especially in the northeast Asia and North American markets, according to a recent report issued by China Literature, China's biggest online reading platform.
Sci-Fi has become one of the top five popular categories on WebNovel, the overseas site of Shanghai-based China Literature.
Sci-Fi has become one of the top five popular categories on WebNovel, the company's overseas site. For example, Mech Touch, created by a Dutch author, received almost 40 million reading clicks. The Oracle Paths and Mutagen, created by a French author and a Philippine author, respectively, received clicks over 10 million times each, according to WebNovel.
Headquartered in the Pudong New Area, FinVolution offers loans and online financial services for firms, including many small- and medium-sized enterprises or SMEs.
It posted an overseas business income jump of 122 percent year on year in the fourth quarter last year, which accounted for almost 13 percent of its total income. In 2022, its international market loan balance reached 800 million yuan (US$116.16 million), a 167 percent growth from a year ago.
The international business helped the New York-listed FinVolution post revenue of 11.1 billion yuan in 2022 with a 17.6 percent growth, despite facing pandemic challenges.
Besides those firms, Shanghai-based Pinduoduo and Shein are expanding rapidly in the cross-border e-commerce market, with Pinduoduo's new service Temu specifically targeting the overseas market.
