PVR’s earnings continued to be hit by COVID in the third quarter. Operating losses increased on a sequential basis, however, rent waiver as part of other income and lower other expenses saved the company from reporting huge losses.

“Cinemas have very gradually opened between October to December, and while cinemas were open we really did not have big releases. We are hoping that in the next 2-3 months as more releases get planned we should hopefully be turned EBITDA positive very soon and hopefully get back to normal earnings over the next few months,” Nitin Sood, CFO at PVR said in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

He further added that a lot of cost reduction initiatives have been taken during the nine months that the business was completely shut.

"I think our pre-COVID level of average break-even occupancies used to be between 23-25 percent. Because of the restructuring of our cost, those numbers will be sub 20 percent levels now in the past pandemic world,” Sood stated.

He also informed that a number of films are pending for release in 2021 which is going to be big and hopefully that April-May will start with the Hollywood release calendar. Bollywood has some big releases, he added and expects the cinema business back to track over the next few months. Watch this interview for more.

(Edited by : Pranati Deva)

First Published:Jan 18, 2021 11:45 AM IST