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The Ultimate Fighting Championship is on a roll at the moment. Recently, the UFC sold ten percent of it's shares to Abu Dhabi's Flash Entertainment to expand into the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and China. The latest deal in their effort of global expansion comes in the form of web partnership with Sohu.com in China. This web partnership is a perfect way to build a foundation for UFC live events in the region now that the UFC's deal with Flash Entertainment makes it easier to setup televised fight cards in China.
With a population of over 1 billion, China is an excellent market to expand to via the internet. The advantage to streaming content via Sohu.com is that users that might not normally watch the UFC on TV might click on it form time-to-time on the website. When checking out a translated version of the website it is easy to see that it is an extremely active portal, and it will definitely serve as a great tool to measure viewership stats and locations when planning live UFC events in the region.
The UFC has set forth some very large goals, and so far they have hit the ground running in an effort to meet their 10 year deadline. If they can keep the pace of these first two big deals up (a deal about every 2 weeks) they might reach their goal sooner than they expected. Other factors that have fallen in to place for the promotion are the excitement around the heavyweight division and the upcoming season of the Ultimate Fighter. Brock Lesnar is back and gearing up to show the MMA world why he is the UFC Heavyweight Champion, and TUF will give us a new cast of fighters to identify (or not) with and Liddell vs. Ortiz III.
As the UFC continues to lay the ground work for expansion, a number of the deals they setup might not directly affect the American audience right away. This is because the product is not being changed or revamped; the UFC is only changing how and where the product is distributed. There is not reinventing of the wheel here. If they keep there plans simple and as strategic as their previous two, the UFC can create a platform that will be hard to shake. Other promotions might end up being absorbed in the long run, but for now the competition has to worry about stateside dominance before setting up a comparable plan.
The question is will the next steps of the UFC's world takeover further expand the ground work they have made in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Chinese regions; or will they dispatch a tentacle to another part of the globe in an effort to efficiently setup simultaneous multi-region infiltration? I would say only time can tell, but based on the way things are moving we might not have to wait that long for the next big announcement from the UFC. A while back MMA business related anticipation generally surrounded who will sign to fight in the UFC, now it surrounds what country is the UFC going to try to link up with next. Times are a changing.
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Alvin Benjamin Carter III is an MMATorch Specialist columnist focusing on the business and statistic side of the sport of MMA. He trains in SanDa / Shan Shou (Chinese Kickboxing) and MMA. He also has a business background in music production, management, and clothing. He has launched two companies which cater to niche markets, giving him experience in examining trends and attitudes that can affect a particular business model, which he applies in his weekly column for MMATorch to the sport of MMA.
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