Harold Meij says New Japan Pro-Wrestling's American expansion, NJPW of America will help current business partners like ROH.
Speaking with Fox Sports, The president of New Japan Pro-Wrestling explains why NJPW of America will be holding a large number of smaller shows rather than trying to hold grand-scale events every time out, citing time differences as a major handicap of NJPW.
"One of the biggest handicaps we have is the time difference. We can’t do a lot of live events on US prime time - if we do one at 6 or 7 o’clock at night, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning in the US, depending on where you are," said Meij. "You’re not going to wake up unless it’s a Wrestle Kingdom or something. Of course, you can still do near-live or streaming, but one of the biggest things is we need to create the understanding of what New Japan stands for. The best way to do that is really like sampling. It’s a sampling marketing strategy. By doing smaller-scale shows in a lot of places, people can physically see what our product is like, come to love it and then join into the streaming service or watch the TV broadcast."
When asked how he perceives this new business venture impacting relations with current partners such as Ring Of Honor, Harold Meij was very confident that only positives will come from this move.
“I actually think it complements a lot of the relationships that we have, especially with ROH for example," he confessed. "As we do these shows and more fans fall in love with our product, as we do more joint matches with ROH - whether ROH comes to us or we go to them - the value of the total package increases. They would see that our wrestlers are very good and so are the ROH ones.”
You can read the full interview at this link.
