You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here. ADVERTISEMENT CONTINUE READING BELOW JIMMY MOYAHA: Ster-Kinekor announced that they would be embarking on a Section 189 – which is retrenchments – restructuring. Essentially what it means is there’s going to be a lot of job losses. They plan on closing down I believe nine of their cinemas with the potential to close down a further eight in the future, depending on their performance.
But a gentleman who would comment around what’s happening in the cinema industry is someone by the name of AB Moosa, who joins me in studio. He’s the CEO of the Avalon Group. That might not sound familiar to you, but it is the CineCentre Cinemas that you’re seeing in Killarney, in Suncoast and all over the country. Good evening, AB. Thanks so much for taking the time and the effort to come to the studio.JIMMY MOYAHA: The cinema industry has been much like the retail space.
And people would sit right next to each other. They would have had to stand 1.5m in the queue to check in, and then on the plane you’re like in an enclosed capsule, sitting closer together than in a cinema seat, to be honest. My late father always used to teach me many lessons, and always said ‘Cut your suit according to your cloth’. So we maintained that ethos in everything that we do.
And so we used that time optimally to implement systems that have proved to be very efficient in the post-pandemic operational systems of our business. And that’s been I think very positive for us. So that does create a challenge for people to do those things that they want to do, but human beings are very social creatures and they want to go out, they want to interact, and cinema is one of those shared experiences where we sell escapism for a few hours.
What we did as a business in terms of the inflationary challenge is we’ve bundled all our products – whether our movie tickets or our refreshments – with a whole set of rewards for everyday items like groceries and fast foods and massages and a whole variety of things. Obviously where we’ve mitigated it is, if you buy a box of popcorn for R50 then you’re going to get R1 000 back in rewards. So you’re getting 20 times back in everyday rewards for clothing and other items.
So obviously human beings want to have social experiences. And ironically it’s actually the more premium experiences – not only in South Africa, but globally. The more premium experience is the one that’s proving to be more attractive in terms of the luxury seating and the other benefits that come with that.
We can’t collectively engage as an industry because that would be anti-competitive. And we, as Avalon, certainly want to be very competitive. Recently we’ve had big films like the Kung Fu Pandas, to name more recent ones, in June, which have done really well. And there’s a good slate coming out in the second half of the year.