PANINI LANDS IN CHINA WITH THE “FIFA WORLD CUP TRADING H5 APP” WORLD CUP

The Panini Group, official and exclusive licensee of FIFA for physical and digital collectible cards and cards, has announced that Tencent Sports will become the Group’s strategic partner in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.
The partnership provides for the supply of distribution platforms for the “FIFA World Cup Trading H5 App”, the brand new app created by Panini that allows fans and fans to collect and exchange digital cards of football World Cup players in Russia. Since last March, this app has already recorded over 2 million downloads in Europe and America and is currently among the top 25 free apps downloaded worldwide in the Sports category. The alliance between the two big names in sport will bring huge benefits to hundreds of millions of football fans in China during the next “FIFA World Cup Russia 2018” event.

According to the agreement, Tencent Sports will become the exclusive distributor of Panini for the “FIFA World Cup Trading H5 App” for the territories indicated above, as well as being responsible for managing the sponsors and advertising sales of the product on the Chinese market and to collaborate with the Panini Group to examine the integration strategies between physical and digital products, providing better services and extraordinary collections to hundreds of millions of users in China. For the future, we expect more extensive and in-depth partnerships and collaborations between the Panini Group and Tencent Sports, designed to engage and entertain the hundreds of millions of Chinese sports fans already on Tencent Sports platforms.

An increasing percentage of Panini Group’s sales of trading products comes from the Asian market and, in particular, from China. At the same time, with the development of digital media, the Panini Group is making continuous progress in the integration of physical and digital collectibles. With its upcoming release in Chinese, the new “FIFA World Cup Trading H5 App” will further increase the experience of collectors’ use and allow the creation of further integrations between the digital and physical products available on the market. In addition to the FIFA World Cup, the Panini Group has established partnerships with various licensors in the world of sport and entertainment such as NBA, NFL, UEFA, Marvel, DC Comics, etc.

Tencent is the leading company in China in the world of digital applications for many years. Tencent, QQ, together with WeChat have jointly built the largest social network of Chinese society. At the same time, Tencent Sports has now become the number one digital sports media platform in China.