By Elina Shatkin, October 28, 2003
Continuing its Asian expansion, Thomson announced the acquisition of Cinecolor Lab Company, Ltd., a Thai company and one of the premiere motion picture film laboratories and post-production facilities in the Austral-Asian film and post-production markets. The acquisition furthers Thomson's strategic goal of expanding the service and geographic opportunities offered by its Content and Network division to the filmmaking community worldwide. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Thomson's strategic objectives for its Content and Network division, as announced at the beginning of the year, are to expand its client base by broadening its service offering and increasing its geographical coverage globally. Establishing a platform for future growth in the Austral-Asian market is a critical step towards this strategic goal.
The Austral-Asian market is expected to be a prime area of growth in laboratory and post-production services over the next decade. According to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), 40% of the international theatrical market comes from the Asian-Pacific region of the world, which amounted to approx. US $3.86 billion in 2002, while the total international box office amounted to US $9.64 billion
. From 2001 to 2002, the International box-office grew by approximately US $1.5 billion.
In 2002, total output from the Asian market reached 532.9 million feet of film processed, from the top seven producing countries: Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan. In Thailand alone, production accounted for 42% of this work, followed by Japanese production at 28%. Technicolor expects screen counts in this region to grow by double-digit annual rates for the rest of this decade.
Thailand has recently emerged as a central provider of film print services for the Asian theatrical feature market -- including both independent features and theatrical features from major Hollywood studios. Cinecolor currently provides services to many of Hollywood's most prominent feature studios including Disney and New Line International.
Cinecolor Lab Co. Ltd. was established in 1977 as Thailand's first film laboratory. Today, it has grown to become a market leader in both film processing and sound services. Its best of class capabilities include front-end processing and release printing; digital video post-production and sound mixing; regional subtitling; video to film transfer; and digital optical sound transfer. The facility employs approximately 200 highly skilled employees and operates in an 80,000 square foot facility.
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