Prime Focus mulls options to reduce overall debt

MUMBAI: Prime Focus Ltd (PFL), the world's largest integrated media services powerhouse, today said it is looking at options to reduce overall debt or bring down cost of debt across the board.

"Over the next 12-18 months, we have to look at bunch of different options to try and reduce overall debt or reduce the overall cost of debt across the board.

"Our debt is a little north of Rs 1,000 crore, about Rs 1,040-odd crore, which has gone up from Rs 984 crore," said PFL Group Chief Financial Officer Vikas Rathee at an earnings conference call here.

"A part of our debt is in foreign currency so there is obviously an impact from perspective of the depreciation of the rupee.

"We actually have reduced a significant amount of higher cost interest bearing debt. Our aim is to use opportunities from operating cash flow generation towards debt," he said.

"The company's subsidiaries, Prime Focus World and Prime Focus Technologies, are independently extremely attractive and I think both have opportunities on their own level for capital enhancement from debt which is at lower cost or other opportunities.

"Over the next 12-18 months we have to look at bunch of different options to try and reduce overall debt or reduce the overall cost of debt across the board."

In fianancial year 2014-15, Reliance MediaWorks merged their global film and media services business with Prime Focus. It also merged Prime Focus World with Double Negative Visual Effects.

These two transactions have been absolutely transformational in the development of the entire group and it is helping position us and taking us onto a path of tremendous scale and credibility and growth across the western markets in Hollywood and consolidation of the Indian marketplace, said PFL Executive Chairman Namit Malhotra.

Commenting on order book position, Rathee said on the creative services side, it is in the range of about USD 170 million, USD 175 million and on the technology side the number is closer to USD 190 million.

During financial year 2015-16, the company is building its Canadian and Indian facilities, he said.

"We are looking to scale up India to get much healthier margins in our business. Our capex has been pretty much been completed in FY15 with some incremental capex which I think will be mainly in India."

The company, listed on BSE and NSE, employs over 5,500 professionals in 16 cities across four continents.

It provides end-to-end creative services (visual effects, stereo 3D conversion, animation), technology products & services (media ERP suite, cloud-enabled media), production (shooting floors, sound stages) and post production, among others.