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Disney’s Successful Adaptation in Hong Kong

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Submitted By 20648009
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Disney’s global expansion – An Asia Perspective

Executive Summary
Disney theme parks had a long history of aggressive market expansion, started first with their first Disneyland opened in Anaheim in July 1955, Disney World Florida 1971, Disney theme park in Tokyo in 1992, and Disneyland Paris in France (Tsai & Liu 2011). Since introduction of its first theme park, Disney has been attaining global profit through expanding their existing parks while entering the new territories. Their ventures into the new Asia market, HongKong, met great hurdles and challenges as there were gaps between Hong Kong Disneyland offer and the local customs that need to undergo urgent local adjustments in order to become accepted among the Chinese and Hong Kongers. Although major changes have addressed incompatibility issues which in turn provided Disney with high profits and competitive advantages, the park faced serious problems including the frequent overcrowded flow of customers, the lacks of creativity and innovation, or the overloaded staff. As HongKong Disneyland has proved fairly successful with increased park occupation and revenues from growth especially from mainland China sector (Matusitz 2011, Tsai & Liu 2011, Zhang 2007), an unexplored market segment in China or in particular the chosen Shanghai catched Disney’s full attention along with many favored factors such as supported environment with lower cost of labor and materials (PR 2011, Schmidt et al. 2007). The decision to expand the operation in mainland china or Shanghai in particular should follow the same strategies as in success case of Disneyland Hongkong. As management has to weigh up the efficiency opportunities of global scale with the effectiveness requirements of location adaptation, the various actions would be taken including analyzing Disney’s own operations, general as well as competition environment

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