Visual China buys Corbis Entertainment

Chinese image licensing company Visual China Group (000681.SZ) said it acquired on Friday the image division and content licensing unit of photo library Corbis Entertainment, owned by Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) co-founder Bill Gates.

The company signed another deal with media service provider Getty Images to distribute Corbis' images and content to customers, thus bringing in a major photo library and an image distributor to China.

Getty Images would distribute Corbis' content, creating a collection of over 200 million images and videos and certain archived historical contents for creative and editorial use.

Following the sale of its image assets, Corbis will be rebranded and its other businesses will operate under a new brand name.

As per the deal, Visual China's division, Unity Glory, will own and manage the images and motion archives, names and trademarks associated with Corbis Images, Corbis Motion and Veer licensing brands.

The financial terms for the deal were not disclosed.

After a transition period, Getty Images said it would offer Corbis creative stills, Corbis Motion content and Corbis archival and documentary content to its customers outside China.

Corbis, which is one of the leading image service provider like Reuters, was represented by Allen & Company LLC in the sale.

(Reporting by Rosmi Shaji in Bengaluru; Editing by Sandra Maler)