It doesn’t happen often so when it does, you know something is afoot in the world of News Corp. Rupert Murdoch, who is currently on a swing through North Asia, has been personally visiting top management at a number of electronics makers and other companies in Japan and South Korea.
Now, he is in China, urging the government to open up the country’s tightly controlled media sector and to clamp down on piracy. As Reuters reports, the News Corp chief also reiterated his favourite refrain of the year, that media must start charging for online content.
More revealing, however, was Murdoch’s agenda in Japan and South Korea, where (apart from some speeches and a conference) he made visits to Toshiba, Fujitsu and Sony in Japan, and South Korean electronics giants Samsung and LG Electronics.
Murdoch, whose international empire includes the Wall Street Journal, Fox TV Network and BSkyB, appears to be gearing up to take on Amazon’s early dominance of the nascent e-reader market, and is looking for partners and tie-ups to help him do that – possibly by launching a rival device. As Reuters noted in a separate report:
Murdoch, whose media empire straddles the Wall Street Journal to Fox TV, said in August he was unhappy with Amazon’s control of relationships with newspaper subscribers for Kindle, and might seek a better deal with rival e-reader maker Sony Corp.
Partnering an e-reader device maker would help News Corp, which owns book publisher Harper Collins as well as newspapers around the world, but which has said it has no plans to become an appliance maker.
Having been a little slow off the mark to fully exploit the rise of digital media, he is clearly determined not to miss out again. And the rewards could be big, as Reuters notes:
Research firm DisplaySearch expects the $100 million e-paper market will grow to $9 billion by 2018. E-reader device sales could hit 3 million this year in the United States alone, according to Forrester Research, and sales could double in 2010. Forrester predicts Amazon will take 60 percent of the market this year, with Sony at 35 percent.
Related links:
Murdoch to charge for all online content - FT
Murdoch revamps top team – FT