Vista Group International (VGL: NZX/ASX), announces its 2017 results today, reporting impressive growth and profitability stats across its businesses, and matching the performance record the business and investor market has come to expect from this New Zealand tech sector company. Implementing a vertical integration strategy across the film industry since listing in August 2014, Vista Group growth has shown significant success in its drive toward achieving majority global market share across its movie industry sectors.

Vista Entertainment Solutions (‘Vista Entertainment’), Vista’s founding and largest business, continued the journey with 793 new cinema sites installed with its Vista Cinema software in 2017 to achieve a cumulative total of 6,350 sites. The achievement took Vista Cinema’s share of the world’s large cinema circuit market to over 43% and equates to revenue growth of 22% (excluding the China consolidated revenue in FY2016 of $6.7m), resulting in an increase in EBITDA of 5.5 percentage points to 29%. Geographically, the company secured business in 11 new countries during 2017, notable being Brazil, Italy, Austria and Sweden.

Movio, the Group’s business that delivers data-driven marketing solutions for the film industry, delivered a 111% increase in EBITDA on a revenue acceleration of 37% to NZ$15.5m. The Movio result included 150% growth of Movio Media due to closure of agreements with film industry leaders Epsilon, 20th Century Fox, Viacom and STX Entertainment.

Additional businesses in the Group punched above their weight with the speed of their growth; Powster, providing creative services to the film industry to engage users with entertainment content, created more than 1,300 online ‘movie destinations’ representing growth of 46% on 2016 and attracting an estimated 422m visitors to its sites – an increase of 290% on the previous year. Powster works globally with more than 90 movie distributors.

Strategic and new business developments in the Group in 2017 supported the Vista Group journey: the acquisition of Vista Entertainment’s long-time business partner in Mexico, Senda; increased shareholding in Vista China (Beijing and Shanghai) and establishing a Vista Group subsidiary company in South Africa were important developments.

As part of Vista’s strategy to create efficiencies in the film industry, particularly significant was the start of trading for movieXchange – a new online platform developed by Vista that delivers, from the cloud, movie promotional media directly from distributor to cinema exhibitor, enables online listing globally of movie showtimes information and, via third party partners, enables the sale of movie tickets; movieXchange transactions have exceeded initial projections.

On the product front, the transition to a fully cloud-based Vista Cinema product gathered momentum with the release of re-imagined products in the key areas of Film Programming and Cinema Management.

Vista Group Chief Executive, Murray Holdaway remarked that he, the Board and all at Vista are absolutely delighted with the 2017 result. “Our consistent growth, including our less mature businesses, and increased income and profitability can be credited to our 600+ globally-located staff. Their hard work, engagement with our customers and unflinching determination to deliver unprecedented technology solutions and services is our biggest strength. As a business we have a shared vision to be the leader in software solutions across the film industry; our 2017 result is evidence that we have a highly committed and connected team delivering on that vision.”

Vista will deliver a final dividend to its shareholders of 1.74 cents/share resulting in a total pay-out at the top end of the policy range of 2.94 cents/share for 2017 and an increase of 28% on the previous year.

About Vista Group International
Vista Group International (Vista Group) is a public company, listed on both the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges (NZX & ASX: VGL). The Group provides software and additional technology solutions across the global film industry. Cinema management software is provided by Vista Entertainment Solutions (Vista Entertainment), the core business of the Group. Movio (authority in moviegoer data analytics), Veezi (cloud-based SaaS software for the Independent Cinema Market), movieXchange (connecting the movie industry to simplify the promotion and sale of movie tickets), Maccs (film distribution software), Numero (box office reporting software for film distributors and cinemas), Cinema Intelligence (business intelligence solutions), Powster (creative studio and marketing platform for movie studios) and Flicks (moviegoer ‘go to’ portal for movie information) provide an innovative range of complementary products across additional film industry sectors, from production and distribution, to cinema exhibition through to the moviegoer experience. Vista Group has offices located in New Zealand (Auckland HQ), Sydney, Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, Beijing, Mexico City, South Africa, the Netherlands and Romania.

Website: www.vistagroup.co
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/vista-group-limited