Cinema Trip Part 3 - The Final Results

Cineworld which I have posted on a couple of times before so I feel obliged to write it up again. They announced final results today along with a flood of other Companies. Not sure why Thursday is such a popular day to announce results? Any way The Cineworld results read OK with turnover up 13% the adjusted pro-forma diluted EPS coming in at 22.6 pence which appears to be nearly as much as the 22.8 pence which was forecast for the year to December 2014 by the analysts consensus according to Stockopedia. So I guess there should be some upgrades to come for this year.

The Key highlights extracted from the results were as follows:

·           Group box office market share of 27.4% (2012: 26.4%) in UK and Ireland (Rentrak) with Cineworld Cinemas' market share up 0.7 percentage points to 25.4% (2012: 24.7%);

·           Group admissions 1.4% higher than 2012 on a pro-forma basis(3);

·           Average ticket price per admission up 2.8% to £5.43 (2012: £5.28) with higher average retail spend per person at £1.83 (2012: £1.73);

·           EBITDA up 8.1% to £72.3m (2012: £66.9m)

·           Full year dividend of 10.1p per share which represents a 6.3% growth in cash dividend for those shareholders which took up their rights as part of the rights issue on 14 February 2014;

·           Opening of a nine screen cinema in Wembley, a new ten screen cinema in Gloucester Quay and the reopening of the Glasgow Science Centre IMAX as a Cineworld Cinema;

·           Nine new Starbucks outlets opened in year bringing total to 11;

·           On 10 January 2014, Cineworld Group announced the combination with the cinema assets of Cinema City International N.V. ("CCI") which completed on 27 February 2014.

The other point of note in relation to the deal is the dividend, which they have re-based to reflect the new shares issued.This is fairly standard practice but does confuse sometimes as the headline number is now lower than before. However, as they point out the overall payout in cash on the new and old shares is up by 6.3%.

Talking of the acquisition this seems to have led to a big fall in the shares since the positive reception for the deal on the day it was announced. So with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight I should have obviously sold on the announcement and then perhaps revisited when the deal and share issue cleared.  So the learning point for me is perhaps I should be a bit more aggressive in my dealings at the margin in situation like this, although I find the steady low turnover approach does work for me generally. The shares at 312 pence are on about 13.8x and yields 3.25% on the announced re-based total of 10.1p. This compares to the 15x and 3.6% the last time I wrote about them. So seems reasonable to me with possible upgrades to come - so I will holds on and not be accepting Mr Markets price to sell today.