About Panorama

Panorama

Panorama, known in Chinese as Quanjing and operating online at quanjing.com, is a Beijing-based photo agency that has been in business since 1993. In a detailed trade survey of China's stock photo market carried out in the mid-2000s, Panorama was described as the largest agency in China. Its online site carried about 100,000 images produced by its own photographers and 400,000 images from overseas agencies, with more than a million film images on file, and about half of its revenue came from pictures produced overseas. The agency employed between 150 and 200 staff in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, about 120 of them in its main Beijing office, and it licensed pictures mainly to commercial and advertising customers. Because Panorama's public record is concentrated in that survey era, this profile presents its documented scale and strategy as they were recorded at the time.

Origins and market position

Panorama's business dated to 1993, which made it one of the earliest commercial photo agencies in modern China and a contemporary of the first generation of stock businesses that appeared as the country's advertising industry expanded. When the trade publication Selling Stock surveyed the Chinese market after spending ten days talking to photographers and stock agents in China, it identified Panorama as the largest agency in the country, ahead of the other domestic names in a market where the leading sellers also included the Chinese operations of Getty Images and Corbis.

The market Panorama led was, by international standards, still small. The general consensus among the stock photo sellers interviewed for the survey was that total stock photo sales in China were about 20 million US dollars a year, with about half the revenue coming from commercial sales and half from editorial sales. Panorama's position at the top of that market was therefore a position in a young industry: the survey also noted rampant middle-class consumerism in the shopping centres of Beijing and Shanghai, and a middle class expected to grow to approximately 520 million people by 2025, which was the growth story on which agencies like Panorama were betting.

Leadership under Lv Chen

The public face of Panorama in the survey record was its chairman and president, Mr Lv Chen, whose statements to the trade press provide most of the documented detail about the company's ambitions and customer base. Lv's figures were treated with caution by his competitors: he said his company's target for 2007 was 50 million US dollars, but, as the survey reported, everyone else the writer talked to was sceptical of that figure, and there was general agreement that about 20 million dollars was about right for the entire Chinese market in 2006.

That gap between Panorama's stated ambition and the surveyed size of the whole market is itself a useful part of the record. It shows a market leader planning for growth far beyond the industry's current measured size — growth that would have to come from customers who were not yet buying stock photography at all — and it explains the customer strategy, set out below, that Lv described in the same interviews.

The online collection at quanjing.com

Panorama's shop window was its website at quanjing.com, an online site searchable in the Chinese language. At the time of the survey it held about 100,000 images that Panorama's own photographers had produced and about 400,000 images from overseas agencies, a ratio that showed how heavily the Chinese commercial market still depended on imported imagery. About 50 per cent of the company's revenue came from pictures produced overseas.

The survey recorded that the direction of customer demand was already clear: by then, all customers wanted search and delivery online. Panorama's half-million-image searchable online library was its answer to that demand, and its structure — a minority of locally produced images alongside a much larger body of licensed foreign content — mirrored the structure of the Chinese market itself, in which locally produced commercial photography had not yet caught up with the volume advertisers required.

The million-image film archive

Behind the online library stood a much older archive. According to Lv, Panorama had over a million film images on file, but they were stored in a back room of the offices and were almost never accessed. The detail captures the transitional moment of the mid-2000s Chinese stock industry: an agency founded in the film era, in 1993, holding a seven-figure physical archive whose commercial value had largely evaporated because customers expected to search and receive pictures digitally.

The contrast between the two collections is the clearest measure of that transition in the survey record. The film archive was more than twice the size of everything Panorama offered online, yet it generated effectively nothing, while the 500,000 online images — most of them licensed from overseas — carried the business. Panorama's documented history is therefore also a case study in how China's first-generation stock agencies were built twice: once on film, for a catalogue-and-transparency market, and again online.

Customers and the commercial focus

Panorama's licensing was concentrated on commercial work. The vast majority of the images it licensed went to commercial customers in the major cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, and the survey recorded that the company made very few editorial sales and did not focus on that segment of the market. Its customers were, in the main, the advertising and commercial users described in the agency's directory profile as its principal market.

This focus distinguished Panorama from China's editorial specialists such as the press agencies, and it aligned the company with the fastest-growing demand of the period: advertising imagery for a consumer economy in rapid expansion. A later trade assessment of the market, published after the Beijing Olympics period, continued to place Panorama in the small group that divided most of China's commercial sales — Getty holding approximately half of a commercial market estimated at about 30 million US dollars, with Corbis, Panorama and Imaginechina generating most of the other half, in that order.

Key accounts and the push down-market

Lv gave the survey an unusually precise account of Panorama's revenue concentration. Between 100 and 300 key accounts, he said, were responsible for about 80 per cent of the company's revenue in 2006. He expected those customers to represent only about 50 per cent of revenue in 2007, because the company was focusing a major part of its marketing on the 1,000 to 2,000 middle-level agencies that had used less imagery in the past and had been responsible for no more than 20 per cent of its sales.

Beyond that group lay a much larger untapped market. Lv estimated that there were between 50,000 and 100,000 smaller commercial and editorial image users in China to whom Panorama sold almost nothing at the time, and the company's plans were to begin reaching out to that segment of the market in a more aggressive way in 2008. The strategy — reduce dependence on a few hundred key accounts by moving down-market to thousands of smaller buyers — was the practical counterpart of the ambitious revenue target he had set for the company.

Offices and staff

Panorama was a substantial employer by the standards of China's young stock industry. The agency employed between 150 and 200 staff across Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, with about 120 of them in its main Beijing office. That four-city footprint placed its sales and production operations in China's principal commercial centres: the capital, the financial centre of Shanghai, the southern trading city of Guangzhou and the international gateway of Hong Kong.

The staffing pattern also reflected the company's business mix. With about 120 of its people in Beijing, Panorama was centred on the capital's advertising market, while the Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong offices served the regional commercial customers who accounted for most of its licensing. In the wider Chinese market of the period, agencies reported that finding people with commercial photo experience was difficult and that trained staff were regularly recruited away by advertisers, publishers and competitors, which made an employed staff of Panorama's size a significant operational asset.

International ambitions

Panorama also looked outward. The survey recorded that the company had high hopes of significantly increasing its sales of images to the world market outside China. The obstacle it identified was the look of locally produced imagery: to sell into that market, Panorama needed to produce business and lifestyle images that might have been shot in New York, Munich or London, and while Chinese photographers had the artistic talent to produce such images, pictures shot in Beijing or Shanghai without models who looked and dressed as if they lived in the West were not likely to sell well in Western markets.

The point underlines the asymmetry of the trade at the time. Half of Panorama's revenue came from overseas pictures sold into China, because Chinese advertisers wanted international-looking imagery; selling Chinese-produced pictures in the opposite direction faced the mirror-image problem. Panorama's documented strategy addressed both directions at once: import the imagery China's advertisers demanded, and learn to produce imagery that could be exported.

Panorama in the later market

Panorama's standing persisted in later assessments of the industry. When Chai Jijun, co-founder and executive vice president of Visual China Group, reviewed the history of the Chinese photo industry in a keynote address to the DMLA conference in 2016, he placed Panorama in the first group of commercial photo agencies in China. The later market survey likewise continued to rank it among the three companies generating most of the commercial sales not taken by Getty.

The fullest record of Panorama, however, remains the mid-2000s survey, and this profile does not extend beyond what that record supports: a Beijing agency founded in 1993 that became, for a period, the largest stock agency in China, built a half-million-image online library dominated by licensed overseas content, kept a million-image film archive it could no longer sell, concentrated its licensing on commercial customers in the biggest cities, and planned its growth around reaching the tens of thousands of smaller Chinese image users who had not yet become stock photography buyers.