News: Universal to open theme park in South Korea

Posted at 11:37 AM EDT (1537 GMT)

May. 24th, 2007 -- SEOUL, South Korea - Universal Studios plans to open a theme park in South Korea, betting that rides and spectacles based on movies such as Spider Man and King Kong will draw in more and more affluent people in Asia's fourth largest economy.

Becoming the latest Hollywood film studio to expand in Asia's burgeoning entertainment resort market, Universal Studios said yesterday it would build the South Korean park by 2012, which could be larger than its parks in Hollywood and Japan.

The project, announced a day after another US film giant Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) unveiled a plan for a Shanghai park, highlights Hollywood's accelerating push to take the world's most popular entertainment to the world's most populous region.

Asia's theme-park industry accounts for nearly half of the global US$23.5bil market and is expected to see a 25% jump in visitor numbers by 2010, according to research firm Euromonitor.

“We want to put you side by side with your favourite heros,” Thomas Williams, chairman and chief executive officer of Universal Studios Parks & Resorts, told a news conference in Seoul.

“(South) Korea has grown into an attractive market in many necessary and critical aspects for theme park and resort development in terms of income, population, consumer interest and growth of the entertainment industry,” he said.

Universal Studios, operated by NBC Universal Inc, a unit of General Electric Co, opened its first Asian theme park in Osaka, Japan in 2001 and is developing two other parks in Singapore's Sentosa Island and in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.

Universal Studios, which will jointly develop the South Korean park with a consortium including the country's POSCO Engineering and Construction, said it was looking at a number of locations and had yet to set the size of the investment. – From Reuters