With big movies in pipeline, coming quarter seems promising: Gautam Dutta, CEO, PVR LTD

Tell us about this idea behind introducing this home grown screen format at PVR, what exactly is it, what sort of capex did it entail for you?

This whole idea has been kind of used internationally and there has been many brands across the world which have their own format of large screen by the name of different companies around the world have used different brand names like Prime, Extreme, MMax and the list is endless. So this is really about creating a black box of technology. We have been working at it for a very long time and finally we got the right concoction to possibly launch our own brand because if you take a macro view of the technologies that all cinema companies use, we are technically buying these technologies from manufacturers of a certain experience. So there is IMAX, there is 4DX, there is new 3D system and we felt that the time had come, the markets were mature enough to see a new technology emerge which could possibly play all sorts of content and give viewers a great experience. And that is how we came up with this whole concept of PXL and this was largely what we pegged it on. It was a mesmerising impactful experience and that is where the whole brief to the technology department was. They went around got the right projectors, sounds. We looked at even aspects of design which nobody else has ever looked at - from leg room seat width to design aspects to F&B concepts. So it is kind of a technology packaged with a lot of comforts built in as well and we believe that this would leave a huge impact on the consumer. So we say it is big on impact, of course the screen size, technology everything plays a very vital role but when these components were all put together the impact was just out of the world.

By covering the entire range of consumer experience with this product, what kind of footfalls have you seen in the eastern market & what kind of growth do you expect. Also, by looking at the international market trends do you think product justified your business plan?

So we currently have close to about 22 screens in east of India and we garner close to about 23-25% market share and we hope that with the launch of PXL we should be able to sort of take this higher. But more importantly, we felt that we needed first a market that would react well to technology and understand technology and a great viewing experience. This was also a training ground for really putting all this together and in Money Square where the first PXL has been put up we were lucky enough to get a great screen size which is close to about 80 feet from left to right. And that we felt would be a befitting start to this whole concept of PXL. So it is very encouraging and I feel for the last 15 days the trials were on and we are asking consumers of how they felt about watching the film on that auditorium and some of the responses were so encouraging that we thought that the prototype had worked, we then sort of today morning opened up the logo which were all done and we are all ready to launch on this Friday.

Talking about the movie pipeline and more importantly how has some of the recent movies like Simran etc have done for you?
They have been good. I think the good news is that we are getting some good films every week. This week we had a Simran, next week we have Kingsman, followed by the big one Judwaa 2 and then we have got Diwali Golmaal, then we have got the Deepika starrer coming in so the pipeline is looking very-very good. And as compared to the last Q3 which was slightly weak, this quarter three should be very encouraging for us.