Netflix to Zero in on Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is the next frontier for Netflix. During the APOS 2022 talks, Minyoung Kim, Netflix Vice President for Content in APAC ex India, revealed how Netflix is zeroing in on the booming Southeast Asian market through key partnerships.
“There’s a great production ecosystem that has been influenced by the inbound production that has come to Thailand,” Kim added. “The behind-the-scenes talent on the production side we can leverage for the overall Southeast Asia region and really start to innovate how we make shows.”
Southeast Asia has become a top consumer of Netflix content over the years, both English and Korean content. Now, Netflix is eyeing its Southeast Asian growth with a particular focus on Thailand and Indonesia.
With the massive success of Squid Game, Netflix crushed the walls that divided English content and local language content. It’s become key to Netflix’s global success, and Kim credits this to their belief that Asia was always meant to create record-breaking shows and movies for the world. But Netflix’s secret to that success is quite curious: Kim shared that when making local language content, they prioritize the local market. They don’t intend to create global hits—they simply focus on creating high-quality local content.
“When we first started in the region, a lot of our producers came to me with English-language bibles, saying Netflix is a global platform, and we need to make global shows from Korea and Japan. But with series like Kingdom, Squid Game, and Alice In Borderland, they’ve realized they can make content in their own language, with everything they know and breathe, and that their local content can become a global show,” said Kim.
In Asia, Netflix has found strong content production footholds in Korea, Japan, and India. And Thailand and Indonesia could soon become key players as well. Fingers crossed that they’ll add the Philippine market to that list soon.
