About The Sun (Hong Kong)

The Sun (Hong Kong)

The Sun (Chinese: 太陽報; Jyutping: taai3 joeng4 bou3; pinyin: Taiyang Bao) was a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Hong Kong by the Oriental Press Group Limited, the company behind the long-dominant Oriental Daily News. It was first published on 18 March 1999 and was written in traditional Chinese, with an electronic edition published online alongside the print paper. Headquartered with its parent group at the Tai Po Industrial Estate, it covered local and international news, finance, entertainment, sport, technology and horse racing, and at its peak it was Hong Kong's third best-selling newspaper, behind its sister Oriental Daily News and Apple Daily, claiming more than a million readers a day. Hit by the rise of free newspapers and the shift of readers online, it ceased publication on 1 April 2016, after seventeen years in one of the world's most crowded newspaper markets.

Launch in a crowded market

The Sun entered a Hong Kong newspaper market that was, by 1999, already well developed and fiercely contested. The territory supported a large stable of Chinese-language dailies competing for the same readers and advertisers, and the Oriental Press Group's own Oriental Daily News had been the circulation leader for decades. Rather than launch quietly, the new paper adopted an aggressive marketing strategy designed to seize market share as quickly as possible. Its youth-oriented branding set it apart from its older sister title: where Oriental Daily News was aimed at a more mature readership, the Sun was positioned as the younger and more adventurous of the group's two papers, courting the readers who had made the brash, colourful Apple Daily such a success since its own launch in 1995.

The Oriental Press Group behind it

The Oriental Press Group was incorporated on 14 January 1969 and began publishing Oriental Daily News on 22 January of the same year. The group was founded by Ma Shek-chun, and his son Ma Ching-kwan took over its operation in 1977. From that base the group built Hong Kong's best-selling Chinese newspaper and, over the following decades, expanded into other titles. It founded the English-language Eastern Express in 1994, although that paper folded, and it created a family of magazines whose names played on the character for "east", including East Week, Oriental Sunday and East Touch, which were sold to other publishers in 2001 and 2002. The Sun, founded in 1999, was the group's second Chinese-language daily, giving the Ma family stable two distinct titles aimed at different generations of the same mass readership.

The 1999 price war

The paper's arrival immediately destabilised the market. To gain share as fast as possible, The Sun was initially sold for only two Hong Kong dollars, a fraction of the prevailing cover price. The move triggered a price war among Hong Kong's local newspapers: most titles cut their prices by around half in response, and the Sun itself later followed the market in gradually raising its price again. The war was ruinous for weaker titles. Contemporary accounts of the episode record that the price war ultimately drove six newspaper companies out of business, a measure of how aggressively the Oriental group was prepared to spend to establish its second daily — and of how little margin Hong Kong's smaller papers had to survive a sustained contest on price.

Content and youthful positioning

Like its rivals, The Sun was a full-service popular daily. It provided local news and international news, financial coverage, entertainment news, sports news and technology information, together with the horse-racing coverage that was a staple of Hong Kong's mass-market press, and reporting on the trends and consumer topics aimed at younger readers. Its reporting style, target market and target customers were similar to those of Apple Daily and Oriental Daily News — fast, visual, entertainment-friendly popular journalism pitched at a broad readership rather than at an elite or specialist audience. Within the Oriental stable, the division of labour was generational: the Oriental Daily held the older, established readership, while the Sun chased younger readers with a more youthful and adventurous tone.

Competition with Apple Daily

The competitive geometry of the Hong Kong market shaped the paper's whole life. Because The Sun and Oriental Daily News belonged to the same group, they together treated Apple Daily, the title founded by Jimmy Lai's Next Media in 1995, as their biggest competitor. Apple Daily had revolutionised the market with its aggressive pricing, colour printing and pro-democracy editorial stance, and the Oriental group's answer was to fight it with two papers at once: the established market leader for older readers and the Sun for the younger audience Apple Daily had done so much to create. The rivalry between the Oriental group and Lai's titles became one of the defining feuds of Hong Kong media in the 2000s, fought across news pages, courts and circulation figures.

Readership and circulation

At its peak the paper claimed a daily readership of more than one million people, making it the third best-selling newspaper in Hong Kong, with Oriental Daily News first and Apple Daily second. Its electronic newspaper also attracted a substantial subscriber base, recorded at 29,000 readers. Independent survey figures gave a more conservative picture while confirming its place in the market's top tier: Nielsen data for 2008 put the Sun at 537,000 readers and a circulation of about 180,000 copies, against 1,762,000 readers for Oriental Daily News and 1,633,000 for Apple Daily on the same measure. Even on those audited numbers, the Sun was a significant third force in a market where most titles survived on far smaller circulations.

The electronic edition and orisun.com

The Sun was published online from its early years, in the same traditional Chinese as the print paper. It cooperated with Oriental Daily News to offer a joint website, orisun.com. Ma Ching Kwan, the Oriental Press Group's chairman, explained that the site enabled overseas Chinese readers to keep up with Hong Kong news, recognising the large Hong Kong diaspora as a natural audience for an internet edition. The group's web operation was relaunched in February 2002 as on.cc, which carried e-paper versions of both Oriental Daily News and the Sun, uploading the full printed edition so that readers anywhere in the world could read the paper as it appeared on Hong Kong newsstands.

A market in structural decline

The environment that had made the Sun's launch possible turned against all of Hong Kong's paid newspapers in the 2010s. Free newspapers, distributed at transport hubs, trained commuters to expect news without a cover price, while smartphones moved younger readers — the very audience the Sun had been created to serve — to free digital news. Titles across the market contracted or closed: the short-lived Sharp Daily ceased in 2013, and the Hong Kong Daily News, one of the territory's oldest papers, closed in July 2015 after years of heavy losses under the Emperor Group. For a second title inside a group whose flagship still led the market, the economics of sustaining a separate youth-oriented daily grew steadily harder to justify.

Closure in 2016

The Sun ceased publication on 1 April 2016. Its closure, after a run of just over seventeen years, was part of the same wave of retrenchment that saw other Hong Kong print groups merge magazines and cut editorial staff in response to the impact of digital media and the internet on traditional print. The Oriental Press Group continued with its flagship Oriental Daily News and its on.cc digital operation, but the experiment of running twin Chinese-language dailies for two generations of readers was over. The paper's full life — launch, price war, peak and closure — fitted inside the final two decades of Hong Kong's great print era.

Legacy

The Sun is remembered as a characteristic product of Hong Kong's late print boom: a heavily promoted, youth-targeted second title launched by the market leader to contain a disruptive rival. Its 1999 debut and the price war it ignited remain a standard episode in accounts of the territory's newspaper economics, because the war demonstrated both the Oriental group's financial muscle and the fragility of the smaller titles around it. Its claimed million-plus readership at its peak placed it, for a time, among the largest Chinese-language newspapers in the world by audience. And its eventual closure, alongside so many of its contemporaries, marked the point at which Hong Kong's newspaper market — long famous for sustaining more daily titles per head than almost any city on earth — finally consolidated around a handful of survivors and their digital successors.