China's comic industry rapidly growing despite challenges

Chinese e-comics platform Kuaikan said on Friday that it will spend 400 million yuan ($57.28 million) next year toward encouraging more people to create Chinese-style comics, as part of its broader push to cultivate a robust content ecosystem.

The move came after Kuaikan's revenue recorded a 100 percent year-on-year growth in the first half of this year despite the challenges of the overall internet industry.

Chen Anni, CEO and founder of Kuaikan, which was founded in 2014 with Chinese internet company Tencent Holdings Ltd as one of its backers, said the company will maintain growth next year and it will step up push to explore overseas markets.

In the first half of 2022, the company's overseas content distribution revenue grew more than 200 percent year-on-year.

According to Chen, as the largest e-comics platform, Kuaikan now has more than 120,000 registered content creators, 13,000 comic works and 340 million users.

A report by China Insights Consultancy predicted that China's e-comics industry is in a rapid development stage and will maintain a compound annual growth rate of 16.5 percent in the next five years.

Kuaikan now cooperates with more than 80 comic platforms to promote original Chinese comics in nearly 200 countries and regions in more than 12 languages, including Japanese, Korean, English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.