Lad mag to venture into China
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-03-30 09:04

The young men's lifestyle magazine Maxim plans to begin publishing in China, hoping its "beer-and-babes" formula will find an audience in the world's most populous market.

Beautiful babes are a big factor in Maxim's success. [file photo]

Maxim, one of several so-called lads' mags that started in Britain, is known for photos of scantily clad starlets, as well as cheeky articles on sex, sports and "stupid fun."

The Chinese editions will be similar to the U.S. version but likely "a little less racy," said Kerin O'Connor, international licensing director for Dennis Publishing, the magazine's publisher.

"Guys are very similar worldwide," O'Connor said. "They have the same kind of aspirations for the way they want to live their lives, and they have the same kind of interests."

The two new local language versions in mainland China and Hong Kong, set to debut April 20, will bring the number of international editions Maxim publishes to 23.

They will be published in a joint venture with the South China Morning Post, an English language newspaper company in Hong Kong.

The new magazines will launch with a combined circulation of 180,000. Maxim will compete with Hearst Magazines' Esquire, a men's magazine that has published in China since 1999. Esquire has a current circulation in China of 326,000.

Maxim debuted in the United States in 1997. Along with Stuff, also from Dennis Publishing, and Emap's FHM, the young men's titles soared in popularity in the 1990s, taking away readers from publications like venerable adult magazine Playboy.

But newsstand sales have slipped recently in a sign that young men may not find the lad mags as much of a novelty.

Maxim, which ranked 13th last year in total U.S. newsstand sales of consumer magazines, saw average single-copy sales in the United States fall to 769,272 in 2003, down 10.6 percent from a year earlier, although overall paid U.S. circulation was down only slightly, according to industry data.

Advertising pages at the U.S. edition slipped about 17.1 percent from 2002.

The magazine began its international expansion about five years ago and in 2002 made its first foray into Asia with a Korean version, O'Connor said.

The cover of Maxim's debut issue in China will feature a Chinese singer/actress whose name has not yet been released, O'Connor said.

China is an attractive market for magazine publishers, but readers outside the large cities such as Beijing or Shanghai can be elusive because of distribution issues, said George Green, president of Hearst Magazines International, which also publishes Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping in China.

"The big problem in China is not sales," he said. "It's distribution."

Maxim also is eyeing other new markets, including Thailand, Singapore and Eastern Europe, O'Connor said.

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