Behind the comeback of "Love Letters to Grandma": A long-termism example in Damai Entertainment's financial report
A "three-no", niche, Teochew dialect film, Love Letter to Grandma, has achieved a high score of 9.2 on Douban and is expected to generate an estimated box office of 1.8 billion yuan. It is the most meaningful footnote in the domestic film industry recently.
This counter - attack growth path powerfully proves that in the current market environment, high - quality content still has strong appeal and emotional penetration. The key lies in how to discover good content and effectively present it to the audience.
The success of Love Letter to Grandma is actually a microcosm of the past accumulation of Damai Entertainment, the producer and main promoter. Behind it is the company's consistent content investment vision and real entertainment strategy. Public information shows that in the past decade, Damai Entertainment has been involved in all domestic theater films with an initial score of over 9.0 on Douban, including Dying to Survive, The Sinking of Lisbon Maru, Good Things, and Love Letter to Grandma.
Judging from the 2026 fiscal year annual report released by Damai Entertainment yesterday, the value of its "real entertainment" strategy has been verified once again in the past year. In the newly released 2026 fiscal year performance, the company's revenue continued to grow at a double - digit rate, increasing by nearly 20% year - on - year to 8.024 billion yuan. The adjusted EBITA was 746 million yuan, and the company has achieved profitability for six consecutive years under this metric.
Analyzing this financial report, it can be found that by deeply involving in content supply ends such as performance investment and production, IP derivatives, and artist concert operations, Damai Entertainment is reconstructing its business model with a diversified business strategy. Remarkably, while exploring the path of sustainable growth, Damai Entertainment has never given up its adherence to the humanistic background of good content.
01. "Mining" High - Quality Content
In the past few years, in both the film and performance business scenarios, Damai Entertainment has continuously extended to the upstream content end of the industry. Relying on its long - term accumulated ticketing platform capabilities, user data, project operation experience, and promotion resources, the company has started to shift from a simple channel provider to in - depth investment and production of content projects.
Love Letter to Grandma is a typical case. Without following the popular big data and other hit calculation methods in the industry, how does Damai Entertainment define and discover good content and have the courage to bet on a "three - no" project? It is understood that this is not the first time Damai Entertainment has cooperated with director Lan Hongchun. Damai Entertainment distributed Lan Hongchun's previous work, Take You to Meet My Mom. Media reports show that at the green - light meeting for Love Letter to Grandma, the film received high scores from all participants, and Damai Entertainment decided to invest on the same day.
The mutual choice between Damai Entertainment and "Grandma" is not accidental. While deeply participating in top commercial blockbusters, Damai Entertainment always reserves space for creation and promotion of works with high word - of - mouth and strong humanistic attributes. From Dying to Survive to The Sinking of Lisbon Maru, from Good Things to the phenomenon - level hit Love Letter to Grandma, Damai Entertainment's presence can be seen behind these four domestic film masterpieces with a Douban score of over 9.0.
More remarkably, against the backdrop of the industry generally chasing fast - paced and short - term monetization, Damai Entertainment still continues to bet on those "slow - burning but profound" works - such as Grandma's Grandson and Breaking Hell, which seem to have a "viewing threshold" and reject the traffic routine. These films have ultimately won market respect with their solid quality. This series of film lists not only constitutes a unique aesthetic resume but also reflects Damai Entertainment's consistent adherence to realistic narrative and humanistic spirit expression.
In the performance field, according to the 2026 fiscal year data, the company's performance content and technology business achieved a revenue of 2.276 billion yuan, a year - on - year increase of about 10%. On the profit side, this business also showed strong monetization ability, with a gross profit margin of 56%. The segment performance was 1.186 billion yuan, accounting for 58% of the company's total segment performance.
This means that the performance business is not just a traffic entrance for Damai Entertainment but is becoming an important engine for the company's profit growth. However, a question worth further exploration is: as a platform with a high market share in the domestic performance ticketing market, the company's performance growth rate should be close to the industry average. Why can Damai Entertainment outperform the market significantly?
The answer lies in the fact that it does not stay in the single role of a "ticketing platform". Damai Entertainment extends and implements the methodology of high - quality content + long - termism in the film investment and production field - by pre - investing in content production and IP operation, it creates sustainable, replicable, and extensible on - site entertainment content assets.
The financial report shows that Damai Performances has entered multiple content tracks, including large - scale concerts, music festivals, dramas, talk shows, sports, and exhibitions. In 2025, it successfully held the 2025 "Queyao" Tour Concert of Jackson Yee and the 4th Aranya·Xiaomi Music Festival or on - site performance projects, and continued to expand diversified scenarios such as music festivals, theater performances, immersive entertainment, and IP offline activities. In the future, as the on - site entertainment consumption continues to expand, Damai Entertainment is expected to further increase its value share in the industrial chain through the synergy between its ticketing platform, content operation, and technology capabilities.
Overall, Damai Entertainment has seized the structural opportunity of the migration of Chinese cultural and entertainment consumption to offline experiences. By transforming from a ticketing platform to a "real entertainment" platform involved in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, it has obtained higher growth elasticity than the natural growth of the industry.
02. The Undervalued IP Licensing Business
Another business that has pushed Damai Entertainment's revenue to a higher growth rate is the IP derivative business, which has not been fully priced by the capital market.
In the 2026 fiscal year, the company's IP derivative business revenue increased by more than 60% year - on - year, reaching a revenue scale of 2.17 billion yuan. Its proportion in the total revenue increased from 20% in the previous fiscal year to 27%, on par with the performance content and technology and film content and technology businesses. This means that the IP business is not just a supplementary item outside of films and performances but has become an important growth curve for Damai Entertainment.
It is worth mentioning that Aliyu, a subsidiary of Damai Entertainment, is actually one of the leading IP agents in China. It holds multiple heavyweight IPs such as Sanrio, Gijinka, and Pokémon, and has established licensing cooperation with brand merchants such as Brook, Beast, and Miniso.
Aliyu's business layout is not limited to simple licensing. Traditional IP licensing mainly earns licensing service fees or commissions, but Aliyu is extending deeper into the industrial chain: it collaborates with upstream copyright holders and trendy toy companies to develop products and establish online and offline stores and pop - up scenarios.
In Damai Entertainment's future business map, the IP derivative business will also play an increasingly important role. Film promotion, music festival, and concert operations are essentially the same as IP operations: they all revolve around content, artists, characters, and fan emotions. Film and television resources and artist resources themselves can also be incubated into IPs, and there is a certain overlap in the user groups of each business segment. Therefore, the IP derivative business can also form good synergy with Damai Entertainment's ticketing, content, and offline scenarios.
From this dimension, the IP derivative business is also a key piece in Damai Entertainment's construction of a "real entertainment ecosystem". As the figurine economy and trendy toy consumption continue to expand, the weight of this business in the company's revenue and profit is expected to further increase and become an important variable for the market to reprice the company.
03. Reassessing Damai Entertainment
In the past decade, the most core keyword in the Chinese cultural and entertainment industry has been online entertainment. Long videos, short videos, live broadcasts, and games have almost defined the previous wave of Internet cultural and entertainment. Users' attention has been continuously shifted online, and content distribution efficiency, algorithm recommendation ability, and traffic conversion efficiency have become the main battlefields for cultural and entertainment companies to compete.
However, since 2024, an obvious change has occurred. The high - growth period of online entertainment has gradually entered a plateau, while offline entertainment consumption has begun to heat up continuously: cultural and tourism in various places has become extremely popular, concert tickets are hard to come by, and figurine stores are crowded with people.
The underlying trend is that users are no longer just paying for digital content itself but for emotional value, social experience, sense of participation, and a "real presence" consumption experience.
In other words, cultural and entertainment consumption is shifting from watching content to going to the scene.
This trend has been reflected in industry data. According to the data of the China Association of Performing Arts, the total revenue of the national performance market in 2025 reached 83.722 billion yuan, a year - on - year increase of 5.19%. Among them, the performance box office revenue was 61.655 billion yuan, a year - on - year increase of 6.39%, and this scale is still in a steady growth stage.
More importantly, performance consumption not only contributes to the box office itself but also drives a series of spillover consumption such as urban transportation, hotels, catering, tourism, and surrounding products. Therefore, it has also become the key direction of cultural and tourism integration encouraged by policies in recent years.
Looking back at the 2026 fiscal year financial report, it can be seen that Damai Entertainment has successfully transformed into a full - category "real entertainment" platform.
The driving force for this transformation comes from both the external dividend of users' migration to offline experiences and the continuous expansion of on - site entertainment consumption, and the release of the full - link synergy effect of "content production, film and performance promotion, IP derivatives, and ticketing transactions" within the company. This enables Damai Entertainment to connect the complete closed - loop from content exposure to consumption conversion.
The upgrade of the business model directly points to the reconstruction of the valuation logic. The valuation of a channel - based ticketing platform is mainly based on market share and commission rate, while the valuation of an on - site entertainment ecosystem operator depends on its IP amplification and project incubation capabilities.
Calculated based on the profit of the latest fiscal year, the price - earnings ratio of Damai Entertainment is only about 25 times, close to the valuation level of the Hang Seng Internet Index. However, compared with Damai Entertainment's high performance growth rate in the past few years and the potential development space of its on - site entertainment and IP derivative businesses in the future, this valuation level is still significantly low.
Therefore, the current performance of Damai Entertainment in the capital market has not fully reflected the substantial changes in the company's fundamentals. In the future, as the proportion of the IP derivative business increases and the market understands its new positioning as a "real entertainment company", the valuation center of Damai Entertainment is also expected to rise further with the expansion of the industry.