Business Trend: Mini KTV, your n

BusinessTrend: Mini KTV, your new singing choice and enjoy the loneliness.

Sharing bike, sharing one-man gym, sharing power bank service, fresh juice vending machine……Now is time for the Mini KTV.

The 2017 annual report of Ubox (836053), the Chinese leading vending machine producer, showed that its new business of MiniKTV has raised over 195 million RMB revenue, over 196 times of last year. TheMini KTV business is enjoying the best prosperous time in the market.

Taking the advantage of mobile payment and sharing economy, the Mini KTV business has developed by surprising speed inChina. These small booths are attracting increasingly consumers to speed their fragments of time in singing and making a revolution to the KTV industry.

Mini KTV booth usually measures around 2square meters with 2 seats, equipped with earphone, microphone, small screen, external mixer and mobile phone chargers, and is located in various spots with heavy traffic. Users scan a QR code with WeChat or Alipay to get access andpay. The main selling point of the Mini KTV is the low price at about 20 RMB per 20 minutes and the convenience, which is attractive to the young generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvpRei0dgvs An introduction to Mini KTV in China

Mini KTV also provides the personalized service that users can record their own music video and share on the social network. And the small booth can also serve as a vending machine and Ad serving.

The advent of Mini KTV is partly due to people's consumption patterns, which tend to be more personalized and fragment nowadays. And partly due to the urban loneliness epidemic, that appeared with the rise of internet technology and lifestyle changes. The Mini KTV fill the market gap for that kind of one-man business.

The idea of Mini KTV is novel but the market has already been crowded. Many small start-up companies were the first pathfinders. Since the establishment of StarKeeper for three months, it has completed three rounds of financing for Angels, A, and A+ with a total financing amount of US$15 million in July 2017. And Thunder, the biggest KTVsongs supplier in China, backed up by Xiaomi, has released the WOW KTV booth.

BAT also joined in this singing war. Based on about 500 million online KTV app users, Tencent created a new-offline entertainment business model called offline Mini KTV self-service shop, where set these booths together with other entertainment services instead of located singly in the cinema or café. It wants to turn the large number of app users into the real offline consumers.

Tencent’s off-line Mini KTV store

As a new-born business, the Mini KTV itself is also facing the challenges. According to a report from STCN, a cinema manager in Beijing said that the rent of KTV booth is increasing over 30thousand per year, but its profitability was not as good as other entertainment services like doll grabbing machine.

Since Chinese consumers’ preference is changeable, keeping the user stickiness is another problem. And excepting the serious market competition, the hygiene issue, fire safety problem and law regulations have to be strengthened.

Although the Mini KTV will definitely bring some challenge to the traditional KTV services as more single users will turn to choose the KTV booth, it can’t take the place of the social and party function of the traditional one. It just fills the market gap of one-man business or satisfies the loneliness of modern people.

The demand from the loneliness of the modern people stimulates the market to push the new products. Maybe in the future, there would appear more one-man business like Mini KTV, combining the fragment time and off-line consuming scenario together.