Sunil Punjabi, chief executive officer of Cinemax India in an interview with CNBC-TV18 said that he expects Q3FY12 to be the best quarter on the back of some big movies slated for release at that time.
He further said that movie releases in the last two months have boosted their utilisations. The company is hopeful of boosting its revenues by nearly 50% in FY12 on the back of better content. Also Read: Cinemax aims 30-35% sales jump in FY12 Below is the verbatim transcript of his interview with Latha Venkatesh and Gautam Broker of CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video. Q: Last week you all launched four screen multiplex in Pune, can you give us an idea of how the footfalls have been in that new place as well as in your other cinema halls. There have been a spat of even if small budget but perhaps some strong positive releases? A: In the last couple of months we have seen fairly large bunch of releases happening more in terms of the English franchise 3D films that helped us gain fairly large segment of momentum on the cinema viewing.Cinema viewing is more like a habit so you land up see film the audience per se is snowball into seeing a lot of more cinemas. What we have seen in the last couple of months is more and more success coming rather than misses. In fact this quarter also when we started off Delhi Belly has done phenomenally much better than what we were expecting to do. Coming ahead is a long slew of films, the Q2 also looks fairly aggressive in terms of kind of releases and also couple of large budget films also coming up. Q3 probably will be the best in terms of the releases which has two Shah Rukh Khan release coming in a spread of five-eight weeks so the flow of content looks well. We are now at 118 screens with the four screen multiplex that we added over the weekend at Pune in Inorbit Mall. The multiplex per se has done fairly well. The weekend saw very large number of footfalls, we almost had 80% utilisation over the weekend and also the weekdays have picked up well. So fairly good addition to the way we have seen and the location is doing phenomenally well because of the mall. Q: The average utilisation we believe is about 30-32%. Do you think we are going to see an improvement given the optimistic tone you are talking? A: Currently the Q1 is looking more towards in that range and Q2 also and the kind of flow of content that we have we should have a fairly healthy number and so for Q3. It will be optimistic to look at some better utilisations for the next two quarters. Q: How time does it normally take for you all to break even in a screen or in a multiplex. What do you expect to end this year with in terms of number of screens? A: In terms of multiplexes we have three multiplexes which is almost ready and waiting for permission to go through. It is the six screener that we are ready in Hyderabad, there is a three screener in Malad and three screener in Surat. These are multiplexes which are ready just waiting government approvals and local level approval that we need to go through. So that is an immediate pipeline. There are another three locations that we are looking also to open one in Bangalore- second location in Pune and one in Chennai. So that is the pipeline which we can see immediately and hopefully operational this year itself. So we will probably hopefully end the year at the 145 odd screens range that is the broad range that we are targeting to end the year with in terms of the number of screens. From a break-even perspective we usually look at three- five years of cash break-even scenario for multiplexes. So it changes depending on which location within a city itself break-even fairly changed depending upon ticket prices, that is the average. Q: What do you expect to do this yearDiscover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
