Moving iMage Technologies, a digital cinema company in Fountain Valley that serves larger national movie theater chains and smaller operators alike, went public last month and is looking to benefit from a turnaround in the COVID-hit movie industry.
MiT (NYSE: MITQ) manufactures and licenses entertainment technology and audio-visual equipment with a focus on motion picture exhibition.
Moving iMage started trading on July 8 and raised about $14.5 million in gross proceeds. The company said it plans to use the money for sales and marketing, and possibly included acquisitions.
Irvine’s Boustead Securities LLC was the underwriter for the offering.
Moving iMage shares closed at $24 apiece on its first day of trading, but had dropped to $3.22 each as of Aug. 25 to give the company a market cap of about $34 million.
Co-founder and Executive Vice President Joe Delgado said things look different “when you have a little financial wind in your sails as a publicly traded entity.”
Industry Recovering
“We do business with all the big guys, the AMCs, the Regals, the Cinemarks. Cinemark is probably our biggest customer,” according to Delgado.
Moving iMage Technologies also works with medium- to small companies such as Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.
“Literally our industry was shuttered both on the exhibition and production side. It was scary,” Delgado told the Business Journal on Aug. 11, speaking of the past year and a half.
Still, “we stayed open every day throughout the pandemic.”
He said the mood inside the company now is “just fantastic” while the firm is ready to start executing the strategy put forth in its prospectus.
Delgado said the company now counts around 20 employees after pandemic-caused layoffs, while before COVID-19 it was “just under 50.”
“Slowly but surely, we’re bringing those folks back as the industry starts to recover,” according to the EVP.
The Fountain Valley company’s financial results show the stress of the pandemic.
The company recorded net revenue of $16.4 million in the year to June 30, 2020, down from $20.8 million in the prior year, according to regulatory filings. Net sales in the nine months to March 31 of this year fell to $5.1 million from $15.5 million in the same period a year earlier.
Contract Award
Moving iMage said Aug. 2 it had been awarded a contract from Alamo Drafthouse Cinema to provide equipment and furnishings for its Alamo theater location in Staten Island. MiT will provide and install all projection and sound equipment for a new nine-screen state-of-the-art cinema.
“We have a very, very solid footprint in the industry,” Delgado says. The company says it “designs, manufactures, integrates, installs and distributes a full suite of proprietary and custom-designed equipment.”
The company’s biggest competitor is Ballantyne Strong (NYSE American: BTN) of North Carolina, he said
“We have a pretty expansive portfolio for proprietary manufactured goods,” he said. “Final assembly and quality control happens here in Fountain Valley.”
MiT is also a licensed reseller and distributor of products of companies including NEC Real D, Dolby, Barco, JBL, Phillips, Severtson, DLP Technology (Texas Instruments), OSRAM and USL Inc.
Delgado also emphasized the importance of the more than $16.2 billion in grant money – known as Shuttered Venue Operators Grants — for live entertainment, including movie theaters, set aside by the federal government to help get the industry branches back on their feet.
“That’s going to be a huge boon to the exhibitors, the cinema owners,” according to Delgadeo. “A lot of that money is going to be spent on technology. We’re very excited about that.”Â
