By Star Chang, posted Jun 27, 2011 at 3:55 PM, 3,416 views,

Rovio Plans to Open 200 Angry Birds Merchandise Stores in China

The incredible Angry Birds continues to expand its fame and glory in China. During April, Rovio Mobile has partnered with China-based mobile gaming portal, to give Chinese players to download official versions of the Angry Birds game. Now the company has initialized the second phase of its strategy by setting up a team, to make Angry Birds even more popular in China. The plan is to put up 200 stores in China within the next three years, to promote and sell Angry Birds merchandise…

The wildly successful mobile game app Angry Birds is still the App Store’s number two bestseller, with downloads top 200 million across all available mobile platforms. The company has started selling Angry Birds derivative products online last year, and successfully sold 3 million Angry Birds stuffed toys and phone cases. The sales of various types of Angry Birds merchandise have exceeded more than US$ 70 million.

The Angry Birds characters have gotten that kind of attention in the world’s biggest market China as well. In China, ‘Angry birds’ mobile phone cases, cushions, T-shirts and other derivative products have been extremely popular on Taobao (China’s biggest online shopping site, similar to eBay). Although those products are not officially licensed or even consider as knock-off, company’s chief marketing officer Peter Vesterbacka wants their goal to become the most copied brand in China. His logic to that is if you are being copied it means that everyone cares and knows your brand.

Rovio targets to have a hundred million downloads of their Angry birds game in China. With the help of China-based mobile gaming portal, DownJoy, the company is doing fine reaching the certain target that they have set online. Now the second phase is to do retail business in China. Their very first oversea China branch office is going to have about 10 working staffs to develop its businesses of games, stores, and business cooperation. They are expecting to have 200 Angry Birds Store made all over China within three years, to sell wider range of different merchandise products such as clothing, and stationary etc. The first store will be launched this year.

It’s all part of a master plan to evolve Rovio beyond its gaming roots on its way to become a well-known entertainment brand, just like Disney. If the official retail store in China makes a success, the birds and pigs will be as popular as Mickey Mouse, or even Hello Kitty from Japan. We just hope that the official Angry birds merchandise products will be price challenging compare to those which are selling dead cheap on Taobao. (official price for 12″ Bird: US$29.99 vs Taobao price: $12 RMB (US$1.85), see here and here)

Source: TechNode, Angry Birds Addiction