De­spite earn­ing $20 mil­lion in rev­enue for the first time, the Cin­e­maONE Group has re­port­ed a net loss of $7.4 mil­lion for fis­cal year 2024.

In the com­pa­ny's au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments for the year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30 2024, the group re­port­ed that the high­er op­er­at­ing costs as­so­ci­at­ed with the man­age­ment of three cine­plex sites re­sult­ed in an op­er­at­ing loss of -$1.4 mil­lion, de­spite see­ing im­prove­ments in gross rev­enue and gross prof­it.

Cin­e­maOne chair­man Bri­an Jahra not­ed the fis­cal year in­clud­ed the first full year of op­er­a­tions of Cine­Cen­tral at Price Pla­ca, which was opened in Sep­tem­ber 2023.

"Gross rev­enue in­creased by 12 per cent to $20.0 mil­lion (fi­nan­cial year 2023: $17.9 mil­lion) which marks the Cin­e­maONE Group’s first ever at­tain­ment of $20 mil­lion in an­nu­al gross rev­enue. Gross prof­it in­creased by 15 per cent to $12.4 mil­lion (fi­nan­cial year 2023: $10.8 mil­lion)," said Jahra, in his chair­man's com­ments.

The loss was fur­ther ex­plained by Jahra, "In­creased and front loaded lease in­ter­est costs as­so­ci­at­ed with IFRS 16 ad­just­ments for new leased prop­er­ties, and the sus­pen­sion of cap­i­talised in­ter­est due to the phas­ing of cer­tain cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­tures, sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­creased fi­nance costs by 74 per cent to $5.1 mil­lion ver­sus the pri­or year (fi­nan­cial year 2023: $2.9 mil­lion). When cou­pled with a tax im­pair­ment of $0.8 mil­lion ver­sus the pri­or year tax cred­it of $0.2 mil­lion, the net loss in­creased to -$7.4M (fi­nan­cial year 2023: -$0.7 mil­lion). "

Jahra, how­ev­er, not­ed that aside from that, the group main­tained pos­i­tive earn­ings be­fore in­ter­est, tax­es, de­pre­ci­a­tion, and amor­ti­sa­tion (EBIT­DA) of $5.3 mil­lion (fi­nan­cial year 2023: $6.6 mil­lion).

He al­so stressed that the com­pa­ny was able to cov­er its fi­nan­cial and debt oblig­a­tions.

Jahra al­so took a pos­i­tive out­look for the com­ing year, not­ing that trends for cin­e­mat­ic re­leas­es ap­peared pos­i­tive and ini­tial re­turns for the first quar­ter of 2025 were pos­i­tive.

"With group ad­mis­sions growth in­creas­ing by 44 per cent to a com­bined to­tal of over 184,000 pa­trons at all three sites in fi­nan­cial year 2024, the Cin­e­maONE brand is cap­tur­ing a greater share of con­sumer de­mand. This fact cou­pled with Hol­ly­wood’s re-op­er­a­tionalised pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion ca­pac­i­ty for 2025 and 2026 has trig­gered the Cin­e­maONE Group's pos­i­tive short and medi­um term out­look," said Jahra.

"At the on­set of FY 2025, the in­dus­try has al­ready ex­pe­ri­enced a resur­gence in film vol­ume and box of­fice re­ceipts as strike de­layed movies such as Sony/Mar­vel’s Ven­om 4 and Dis­ney’s Mu­fasa: the Li­on King were re­cent­ly re­leased to healthy au­di­ence ap­peal. Dis­ney An­i­ma­tion’s de­ci­sion to by­pass a straight to stream­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion plan and to even­tise Moana 2 with a glob­al the­atri­cal de­but has al­so proven to be a very suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy which demon­strates the health of cin­e­ma ex­hi­bi­tion. Re­leased in late No­vem­ber, Moana 2 is rapid­ly ap­proach­ing US$1 bil­lion in glob­al box of­fice re­ceipts. "

He added, "In­deed, film sup­ply vol­ume and the cor­re­lat­ing glob­al box of­fice is pro­ject­ed to re­turn to, or ex­ceed, fi­nan­cial year 2023 and even pre-COVID-19 lev­els in fi­nan­cial year 2025, with the glob­al re­lease of mul­ti­ple movie ti­tles in the im­por­tant gen­res of ac­tion ad­ven­ture, fam­i­ly, comedic ac­tion, sus­pense and oth­ers from all ma­jor stu­dios.

"We are en­cour­aged by the pre­lim­i­nary re­sults from the first quar­ter 2025 demon­strat­ing that group at­ten­dance is up over 20 per cent above the pri­or year first quar­ter giv­en the in­crease in film sup­ply vol­ume."