Bloomberg’s Smith: Asia operations are stronger than competitors

Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith sent the following message to the staff:

We’ve had a big few weeks in Asia-Pacific, so I thought I’d focus this month’s memo on our numerous efforts underway in the region.

Last week’s launch of Bloomberg Business Asia was an important milestone for our global Media efforts. While we covered Asia extensively on our previous site, we’ve never before had a dedicated regional mobile-optimized website for business and financial executives in the region. Bloomberg Business Asia represents the last pillar of our multi-platform approach for the Asian market, adding the critical digital platform to our existing Asian television, print, live events, and radio presence. Early results are promising — on day one, we saw a 24% increase in click-throughs to articles from the Asia homepage, suggesting that our APAC users are eager for more relevant news and content. Congrats to Anjali Kapoor and her team, as well as others across product, R&D, and editorial.

The APAC region is incredibly important to Bloomberg LP and represents a key growth market for the future of our Core businesses as well as for our Media efforts. On the commercial front, our APAC Bloomberg Media businesses, led by Parry Ravindranathan, have grown revenue nearly 50% since 2012. This year alone, TV revenue in the region will expand at double-digit rates.

Our Asian media products are well positioned versus our global business/finance competitors. While traditional players like The Wall Street Journal are retrenching and upstarts like Business Insider and Quartz are building new operations in Asia, we continue to invest into our unique position as the only global media organization that is truly multi-platform in the region.

Recent updates from our various Asian platforms include:

• Digital: Prior to the launch of Bloomberg Business Asia, we’ve been experiencing growth here. In September, Bloomberg’s digital properties reached 3.6 million desktop unique visitors in Asia Pacific according to comScore — more than The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, CNNMoney and Business Insider — realizing +34% year-over-year growth. Year-over-year growth in the region in the previous months of July (+82%) and August (+71%) were even larger. [Note – comScore does not measure mobile consumption in Asia yet.]
• TV: We have a powerful TV footprint in Asia. Of our three regional TV markets, we are most competitive with CNBC in Asia and are leading in key markets in the region such as Hong Kong. We’ve also built local TV partnerships in the high-growth markets of Malaysia, India, Mongolia and the Philippines. These partners are English-language extensions of Bloomberg TV, bringing 24-hour business & finance news channels to growth markets. We expect more TV partnerships to be announced in the region soon.

• Radio: In September, under Al Mayers’ leadership, we expanded radio to Asia, with five hours each day of local programming that builds off Bloomberg’s other reporting and analysis in the region.
• Print: Our largest print properties in terms of circulation and advertising in Asia are Bloomberg Markets and Bloomberg Pursuits with a majority of each magazines’ readership outside the U.S. Across our three print publications (including Bloomberg Businessweek), we rank #2 in total affluent audience according to the research company IPSOS. We also have a number of Businessweek partnerships, which extend the magazine into local-language markets.

• Events: We began building our regional events business last year with the ASEAN Summit held in Bangkok in late 2014. This year we added the Bloomberg Markets Most Influential Summit in Hong Kong and a second annual ASEAN summit being held in Kuala Lumpur in December.

There is tremendous potential for our media businesses in Asia. We have built a strong foundation and will continue investing in our teams and products in the region. Now that we have all of our platforms in place, next year will be about growing and monetizing our Asia audiences while enhancing our efforts as supporting partners to our Core businesses in the region.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so just hit reply and offer any question or comment you might have.