What is DreamWorks Animation?
"DreamWorks Animation creates high-quality family entertainment, including CG animated feature films, television specials and series, and live entertainment properties, meant for audiences all around the world." They have theatrically released a total of 27 animated feature films, including Shrek 2, which remains the eighth-highest grossing film of all time in the domestic box office. Beginning in 2010, DreamWorks has made it their mission to release a total of five movies every two years, and ever since 2007 all of their films have been released in 3D in addition to 2D. Most of the company's revenue currently comes straight from their feature films, but they also receive revenue from the licensing and merchandising of their films and characters in markets around the world. Apart from it's main focus of feature films, the company has also been producing short television series based on its films. These series include shows such as, their Christmas special, Shrek the Halls. DreamWorks Animation has not always been its own separate company though. Prior to October 27, 2004, DreamWorks Animation was actually a division of the old DreamWorks Studio. Despite the separation, the company appears to being doing great on its own for "DreamWorks Animation has been named one of the '100 Best Companies to Work For' by FORTUNE® Magazine for five consecutive years." In 2013, the company was actually ranked #12 on the list.
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What's their business style?
Conglomeratization: DreamWorks Animation is by no means a conglomerate. They are their own company dedicated to producing animated feature films. In the past DreamWorks Animation did have some conglomerate like activity when it was a part of the old DreamWorks Studio. DreamWorks Animation was formed by the merger of the feature animation division of DreamWorks Studios and Pacific Data Images (PDI). Originally it was under the banner of the Old DreamWorks Studio in 1997, but it was turned into a separate public company in 2004. That is where the company is today.
Horizontal Integration: DreamWorks Animation does not actually own any other companies in its field, aside from Oriental DreamWorks and its newly acquired Classic Media. Classic Media is now being referred to as DreamWorks Classics. DreamWorks Animation does not have an overwhelming amount of physical merchandise stores, but one can easily access their online stores from the official website. DreamWorks Animation is not overly active in reference to horizontal integration.
Vertical Integration: While DreamWorks Animation does not truly "own" any of these companies, it does have close relationships with the companies that distribute its movies. The company has had a working relationship with Paramount Pictures since 2006, when they began distributing DreamWorks Animation's films, but the Rise of the Guardians was the last film distributed by Paramount. The company's films are now distributed by 20th Century Fox. DreamWorks Animation also has a partnership with HP, which has lead to the studio exclusively using HP workstations and servers. Since then DreamWorks Animation has acquired another partner. In June of 2013, the company announced a new deal in which it was going to provide 300 hours of exclusive original content to Netflix.
Globalization: At this time, DreamWorks Animation has two main studios. Their headquarters is located in Glendale, California, while the PDI/DreamWorks studio is in Redwood City, California. In addition to these two California based facilities, according to the official DreamWorks website "the company has recently been working with Thomson/Technicolor to build an animation enterprise in Bangalore, India." In 2010, DreamWorks Animation also established a Shanghai based entertainment company named Oriental DreamWorks, dedicated to developing and producing original Chinese films.
Media Synergy: DreamWorks Animation is definitely a media synergy. It releases many different types of products based off of one film. For example, the Madagascar film series has developed into a short TV series and holiday specials. This also includes DreamWorks working with Nickelodeon to produce the television series, The Penguins of Madagascar. Along with the films and TV series comes a Madagascar-based theme park in Singapore. DreamWorks Animation even took to Broadway in 2008 to develop Shrek into a musical, and it was a huge hit!