BENGALURU: Prime Focus Limited (PFL) reported 32 percent growth in Income from Operations (TIO) in the quarter ended March 31, 2015 (Q3-2015, current quarter) to Rs 420.54 crore from Rs 316.67 crore in Q2-2015 (quarter ended December 31, 2014) and 77.7 percent more than the Rs 236.60 crore in the corresponding year ago quarter (quarter ended March, 2014, or Q4-2014). The growth in revenue was driven by robust revenue growth across the creative and technology businesses combined with increasing synergies from progressive integration of Prime Focus World (PFW) and Double Negative (DNeg) says the company.
Notes:(1) 100,00,000 = 100 lakh = 10 million =1 crore
(2) The company had filed results for a fifteen month period ended June 30, 2014, hence y-o-y comparison is being done between Q3-2015 and Q4-2014 and q-o-q comparison is between Q3-2015 and Q2-2015 (quarter ended December 30, 2014).
The company reported almost triple (2.96 times) the EBIDTA at Rs 105.15 crore as compared to the Rs 35.48 crore in the immediate trailing quarter and almost two and half times (2.48 times) the EBIDTA of Rs 42.36 crore in Q4-2014.
The company reported PAT without exceptional items at Rs 17.6 crore. Post exceptional items (including Rs 39.8 crore mainly due to deconsolidation from the balance sheet of the UK PLC post divestment), loss for the quarter was Rs 20.3 crore as compared to a loss of Rs 36.17 crore in Q2-2015 and a loss of Rs 7.16 crore in Q4-014.
Let us look at the other numbers reported by PFL in Q3-2015
Figures A and B below show PFL’s major expense heads. As is obvious, a major expense head for the company is employee benefit expense or EBE.
PFL’s EBE in Q3-2015 at Rs 232.94 crore (64 percent of TIO) was 17.9 percent more the Rs 197.54 crore (62 percent of TIO) in Q2-2015 and more than double (2.26 times) the Rs 102.95 crore (43.5 percent of TIO) in Q4-2014.
Fig B indicates that EBE also shows a linear upward trend in terms of percentage of TIO over the nine quarters starting Q4-2013 until the current quarter Q3-2015. EBE has been the highest in Q1-2015 both in terms of absolute rupees and in terms of percentage of TIO during the period under consideration.
Finance and Interest cost in Q3-2015 at Rs 14.21 crore (3.4 percent of TIO) was 17.8 percent lower than the Rs 17.28 crore (5.4 percent of TIO) in Q2-2015 but was 32.1 percent less than the Rs 10.76 crore (4.5 percent of TIO) in Q4-2014.
PFL executive chairman and group CEO Namit Malhotra said, “It has been a progressive quarter for us in terms of accolades for our work and a steep step up in performance. We brought Double Negative into the Prime Focus fold with the intention of adding “A”-level pedigree on the Hollywood side and this has already started to deliver with the Oscar for VFX in Interstellar. On the Indian side of the business, the merger with Reliance MediaWorks has established Prime Focus as a distinct leader in the Indian creative services space. The recent win for Kick at IIFA 2015 adds another feather to our cap. On the technology side, Hotstar and BARC are two major validations of PFT’s technology competence and Digital Next is exactly what the market wished for. DAX integration has started to yield results in the US market too. The combination of this strength in creative services and our fast expanding Cloud technology business has built a substantial powerhouse from a M&E product and services standpoint — expanding customer base of CLEAR Media ERP and cloud media services; the profiles of the movies we’re doing on both sides of the world; and the level of infrastructure that we’ve added is second-to-none. I am glad to state that we have a higher order book and more robust order pipeline across all our business segments than ever before – the entire management team is focused on execution on both revenue growth as well as achieving the significant synergies across our business segments.”
