Photo: daylife.com

He might be a foreigner, but Tony Vaughan has a very authentic sounding Chinese name (Fang Donglin 方东林) and although his Chinese isn’t super fluent, he has enough to answer my questions. Tony, having lived in Shanghai for the past four years doesn’t quite qualify as a China Expert, however he does use chopsticks properly.

He is a very positive and happy character and his positive mental attitude and creativity gives him a distinct air of achievement.

He is the CEO of Warner Brothers Home Entertainments Co. and is trying to break into the China market with genuine DVDs!

Since 2005 Warner Brothers Home Entertainments has joined forces with a Chinese film company to try and become the biggest distributor of DVDs in Mainland China. It was in the March of that year that the big boss of Warner Brothers gave Tony the challenge of breaking into the China market, starting with Shanghai.

Before interviewing Tony, I had very strong reservations. For a start, the fake DVD/VCD market is very strong in China, not to mention the ability for viewers just to download or stream movies off the internet. How could legal DVDs really make it big under such existing market conditions?

Photo: myauthenticsguys.blogspot.com

Our interview took place in Beijing Qianmen’s Laoshe Teahouse. He was a bit tried from a sales pitch, but despite this he insisted in replying to all my questions in Chinese. Although not all that fluent, he still managed to display a certain amount of humor and one by one my doubts were dispelled.

Tony explained that since 2004 Warner has been carrying out extensive research in China and on the way the DVD market works. The result of which has been that all you have to do is find a suitable price.

At the time DVDs abroad were priced at 100-150 RMB a piece, with legal DVDs in China priced way above market odds at 50-60 RMB. Tony said that their plan is to introduce a three tier system of ‘Plain’ ‘Silver’ and ‘Gold’.

The plain one comes with no options and cost 10-15 RMB back in 2006 when it was first launched. Silver comes with Chinese dubbing or subtitle choice options priced at 22 RMB, and the gold version has all the usual options and will set you back 32-36 RMB.

Tony’s philosophy is that this is a price low enough for Chinese people who want to experience the quality of a legal DVD to pay.

Starting out back in 2006 with only Warner films, they soon started producing cheap but legal versions of Paramount and Dreamworks movies in the same format. Indeed, it wasn’t long before sales of the cheap and high quality DVDs It has been through synergies with local Chinese home entertainment companies that Warner have, against all the odds, managed to break into the Chinese DVD market.

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