Beijing Enlight Media Co, one of China's biggest private media and entertainment companies, saw its shares surge on Thursday after its latest small-budget film So Young proved a success at the box office.

The Shenzhen-based company's shares grew by 0.84 percent Thursday to 28.65 yuan ($4.65), compared with 2.16 percent drop in the culture sector.

The film earned more than 45 million yuan at the box office on the first day, April 26, a record high in the history of 2D Chinese-language movies.

"The box office had surpassed 300 million by 5 pm," Wang Changtian, CEO of Enlight Media, revealed on his Sina Weibo Wednesday.

Data from Beijing-based entertainment industry consultancy Entgroup International Consulting on Thursday indicated So Young raked in over 142 million yuan within three days, compared to the 103 million yuan collected at the box office by the US Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp's 3D animation The Croods in nine days.

So Young will continue performing well and contribute greatly to Enlight Media's financial reports as it has done to the company's stocks, Hou Tao, vice president of Entgroup, told the Global Times Thursday.

Enlight Media declined to comment when contacted by the Global Times Thursday, but the company said that it will not extend So Young's theatrical release despite the film's increasing popularity.

According to a first-quarter financial report released on April 23, the company expects its net profits to increase by 120 percent year-on-year to 179 million yuan in the first six months mainly due to the good box-office receipts of four films including So Young.

The revenue of the company's main operation recorded a 94.8 percent increase year-on-year in the first quarter thanks to its comedy Lost in Thailand, which released on December 12 and earned a total of more than 1.2 billion yuan at the box office.

It will be hard for So Young to follow Lost in Thailand's success due to fierce competition from Iron Man 3, said Hou, predicting that the Hollywoodsuperhero blockbuster is likely to earn 700 million yuan in box-office sales.

Data from mtime.com, an online domestic entertainment information provider, Thursday showed that Iron Man 3's box-office receipts soared to 130 million yuan with approximately 2,500 screenings on the first day, May 1.

Small-budget films are good efforts on the part of domestic media firms, which are not mature enough to compete with their foreign peers in Hollywood, whose film production has been industrialized, Xiao Mingchao, general research executive of Beijing-based market research firm Sinomonitor International, told the Global Times Thursday.

"Besides, foreign entertainment companies usually have several projects going at the same time, with very professional teams making sure the works earn profits, which reduces their risk on any one film," said Hou.

In China, the majority of players in the market gain money mainly from the box office, he noted.