Live Company Group PLC (LON:LVCG) Executive Chairman David Ciclitira caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the BRICKLIVE contract renewal and extension in South Korea.
Q1: David, we’ve just seen that BRICKLIVE have renewed and extended contracts in South Korea. Can you tell us a bit about the new agreement with HiBrick?
A1: HiBrick is Mr Kim, and Mr Kim is our second largest shareholder and he’s been very supportive of the business from the time I really got involved and both he and I really invested in the business pretty much from day one. He believed in the business enough to convert his shareholding that we had in a company called BRICKLIVE Far East into the Live Company Group so he’s just under 20% shareholder, obviously that makes him a related party so hence why an RNS has come out today.
We’ve been very close with him, he’s pioneered the centres in Korea and the COEX centre opened last March and has been a great success and we’ve opened other centres in Korea. He wants to develop this part of the business and we’ve also got a new area which he’s interested to be involved in, which I think we referred to in the release, which is a brand extension called BRICKLIVE Lite.
BRICKLIVE Lite is a pop-up show in malls in Korea, like much of Asia life is centred around shopping malls and so that is something that is interesting, it’s in line with kind of what we’re doing in China with BRICKLIVE Kids I China. He’s also interested in extending the involvement, he’s potentially interested in being involved in the BRICKLIVE Kids’ Café roll-out so genuinely, he’s a big supporter so we’re happy to have him involved.
He’s also been pioneer, along with myself, in the education side of the business, we’ve actually set up a new subsidiary called BRICKLIVE Education which really will come live towards the end of the year. We’ve test marketed in the centres in Korea lots of different forms of education, both with the BRICKLIVE, obviously the basic LEGO components, but we’ve also done quite a lot with the Minecraft, both the game and the coding experience that kids experience with the digital side of the business. So, BRICKLIVE Education is something I really believe in and with so much going on you can’t do everything at the same time, but this is definitely something we will be looking to rollout in Q4 this year.
Q2: We know about BRICKLIVE, can you just explain what BRICKLIVE Lite is?
A2: It’s just basically giving a short, over a weekend, in a mall pop-up as opposed to a full exhibition, it involves some brick experience. Malls are very keen to keep people in malls so if you think of Westfield in London, they have a focus of ensuring that obviously their own licensees are basically kept happy with the traffic.
Obviously, BRICKLIVE as a project is incredibly popular so this an opportunity for, over a very short period of time, for people to experience BRICKLIVE and quite a lot of the funding relating to that will come from the malls themselves.
Q3: What will this mean for the Touring brand in Asia?
A3: Basically, part of the agreement, the extended agreement and by the way, the agreement has been extended by basically 2 years so it’s now to the end of 2022, it was originally to January 15th 2021 so just 2 years extension, is that we want to extend BRICKLIVE Touring which is a completely different project and we want to develop it with other partners. So, this gives us the freedom in Korea, with a blessing of our seed partner and second largest shareholder, to develop it because it needs a theme park venue, it needs something that basically Mr Kim’s not able to provide. So, we’ve agreed that we obviously will be able to develop that brand in Korea and obviously other parts of Asia, specifically in Korea we’re obviously very keen to do that.
Q4: You mentioned earlier, BRICKLIVE Education, can you explain what this is and what this might mean for BRICKLIVE in Asia?
A4: One of the things about BRICKLIVE, probably one of the key things really, is it’s the experience of kids creating, constructing, it is not being on a ride, they’re actually engaged in physically building things, that in itself is an education. For Asian families, they spend a great deal on education, in fact I was looking at a survey the other day, something like four times what people do in the UK for their kids, and whether it’s coding, in Korea coding is now in the curriculum in the schools, so they’re advanced in everything in the Asian environment.
We are developing, and I’d rather not say too much now because it’s something we will be announcing later in the year, a series of educational programmes and they will be run in the centres initially, both in China and in Korea, and what’s been interesting is that parents are happy to pay. Inside the BRICKLIVE centres, there are classrooms and I don’t think people really realise that so there are existing classrooms with teachers who are working on an educational programme.
So, this is very much an early-stage test for something on a much larger scale because what we’d like to do is to develop the programme, we are looking at various alliances now so the reason the company has been set up is that we hope, in the future, to work with other brands and have BRICKLIVE Education pretty much as a standalone entity.
So, I can’t really say very much because it’s in development and we will be announcing something later in the year.
Q5: There is quite a lot going on, are there any other update we should know about?
A5: It seems to be we’re talking every week but there’s lots going on, particularly in Asia. The thing I’d like to say is that Mr Kim has been the most perfect partner to us because not only has he supported us financially, but he has pioneered the centre programme and he’s now looking to pioneer new things. He’s a great believer in the brand ‘BRICKLIVE’ and, as I said, he’s been there pretty much from the beginning of ’17 and he’s been a fantastic partner to me and for the other shareholders in the Live Company Group because, as I said, he owns just over 19% of the company. So, the fact that he wants to invest more in his local environment, I don’t have to say much more really, he’s seeing the results of what he’s invested in.
